This week's conversation was started by a May 27  blog post by Lisa Thumann titled Coping with Distractions . As always, Lisa, Sheila and Maria found plenty to talk about with a bit of giggling as well.  The chat room was busy too.

Chat Log

This week was open mic week.  Maria Knee, Sheila Adams, and Lisa Parisi were joined by Lucy Gray and Sue Roseman to discuss many topics such as: twitter issues, NECC 2009, and making changes top down vs. bottom up.

Chat Archive:

11:36:26  MariaK -> : stream in etta and ustream

Prompted by an article he shared from the NY Times, Out of Work in Finance, They Turn to Teaching, we asked Kevin Jarrett to join us. The discussion about the implications of the program mentioned in the article included talking about good teacher preparation programs, mentoring for new teachers, and the teaching profession as a calling.

Maria lost the stream several times when skype crashed on her end. The complete audio is in ustream.

This week, Lisa Parisi, Sheila Adams, and Maria Knee led a conversation about dealing with multitasking. They discussed an article from Educational Leadership March 2009 Issue.  They were joined in the Skype call by Sue Roseman. 

Lisa and Maria were joined by Maureen Tumenas to talk about how to help teachers make changes in their approach to curriculum. The discussion centered around how can teachers begin to change the way they have always taught their curriculum so it can be more collaborative, interactive and engaging for students. Should teachers be taking "baby steps" towards using technology or should they be expected to "jump in" with both feet? As usual, there were lots of opinions expressed in this Conversation.

This week Lisa, Maria, and Sheila are joined by Brian Crosby for a discussion on taking simple lessons and using them to break down the walls of the classroom.

Chat here.

Our topic for Conversations this week was EarthCast09 which led to a discussion about broadcasting live with students. Sheila shared her experiences in broadcasting with her 7th grade students during EarthCast08. Matt Montagne joined us near the end of the hour to talk more about Earthbridges and EarthCast09 and his students' work with Gator Radio.

In this conversation we focused on the type of student we are creating in our classrooms where we empower them to be in control of their own learning. We discussed what this means when these students leave us and go to another classroom where this does not happen.