planning

Teachers Teaching Teachers #54 - 05.23.07 How do we keep it real in school blogs?

Paul Allison — Thu, 24 May 2007 20:31:15 -0500

We invite you to listen in as eight Writing Project and WorldBridges teachers from five different (U.S.) states reflect on our students work in Youth Voices.

Alice Barr, Yarmouth HS, Yarmouth, Maine
Barbara Mehlman, Humanities and the Arts High School HUM, NY. New York
Bill Oneal, Trenton Central High School, West, Trenton, New Jersey
Ken Stein, Satellite High School, Midtown, NY, New York
Lee Baber, F. Hillyard Middle School, Broadway, Virginia
Matt Makowetski, MHS, Lompoc, California
Paul Allison, East Side Community HS, NY, New York
Susan Ettenheim, Eleanor Roosevelt HS, NY, New York

After welcoming our newest members of the community, we spent some time celebrating what is going well in this school-based community of about 1000 student writers/bloggers. We discussed ways we might collaborate more over the summer and into next fall. And we began to make plans for next year. We are a community of teachers, focused on fostering a social network where students can become compelling bloggers. Some of our questions include:

How can we cover all of the required skills and topics of our various curricula (technology, global studies, art, English...) and still allow students to blog about topics of their own choosing?
Could we select a group of books and invite students to form communities (reading groups) around each of these? How could we have a common text or common texts available as an option for students to blog about... without loosing our environment of student choice?
How do we continue to nurture our ethic of student peer response. Do the sentence starters we've been using work? Can they be more open?
Can we use the elgg to share multimedia work, art, or visual work more? How do we sponsor peer response to this work? Can we all learn to use the wiki more, following Susan Ettenheim's lead on Gallery pages like Flash Creations Page 2? Will an update to the new elgg profile pages (see Paul Allison's example) be part of the solution?
How do we remain a community of teachers that is open to new teachers jumping in with their students, yet maintain a transparent support structure where we can share tips and community standards (e.g. "only Creative Commons images, please, and no pictures of the students themselves... and... and...)?
What role might our wiki play: http://elggplans.wikispaces.com? How might we organize this site better? How do we get everybody to contribute to and use this site?
Could we use our new Gcast to stay in touch on a regular basis? (Email Susan Ettenheim -- SEttenh@schools.nyc.gov -- to learn more.)
What can we do this summer to build this community? (Step one. All of us should register at the elgg: EducationBridges.net - We'll form a community or communities there.)

Come hear us talk about these and other questions. Hear what teachers talk about when they talk about their students blogging in an elgg. Join the conversation! Leave a comment if you would like to join Youth Voices, and start blogging in your classroom.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #52 - How do I work blogging into my daily curriculum?

Paul Allison — Thu, 10 May 2007 22:35:42 -0500

Bud Hunt asks the question like this: “How do I work Youth Voices [a school-based social network of 1000 student bloggers] into my daily curriculum? How do I use it either to replace existing writing or to support the writing instruction that I want to do?”

Like many of us, Bud is convinced that he has the tools he needs (Elgg is just one example.) to bring blogging and social networking into into the center of his writing, reading and research curricula. Teachers like Bud have learned that students who are asked to blog weekly (or thereabouts) about issues and topics of their own choosing achieve and go beyond the goals we have for them when we teach writing in more traditional ways. (If you’re not yet one of the “convinced,” please take a look at our students work on Youth Voices.Perhaps you’ll find evidence that supports our convictions. Also checkout what the students themselves say when they write in our “How am I doing?” community blog.)

The problem is, how do we make it work? Although each teacher has a unique situation, many of us face constraints that are similar to the ones Bud points to when he asks, “How do I fit Elgg into my language arts curriculum? More specifically, how do I do so in neat, nine-week chunks? (My courses are all on the quarter system.)”

Bud sums up with these kind words: “I love, love, love what y’all are doing with YouthVoices. I want my students to be involved in a strong writing community — I just don’t know how to practically do so. ”

Many teachers find themselves, like Bud, on the brink of using student-centered (because the topics come from each individual student) blogging. And perhaps it’s not too bold for those of us who have been involved in creating Youth Voices–a community of practice for high school bloggers–to say that we can show that this kind of blogging both engages students and helps them to reach toward higher and higher standards of writing and multimedia communication. We are ready to encourage those of you on the edge to find ways to solve your very real logistical problems. It’s worth it.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #22 - Elgg Storytelling

SusanEttenheim — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 20:48:01 -0500

Teachers Teaching Teachers: Elgg Storytelling #22
September 28, 2006
Download mp3 (47:12, 43.2MB)

We had many questions guiding our storytelling about using elggs in secondary classrooms. See Paul’s post Continuing adventures in elgg-land.