Paul Allison

We invite you to follow this conversation that Paul Allison had with two old colleagues, Chris Sloan and Ron Link and others. For this webcast, Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim invited two New York City teachers, Cheree Himmel and Crystal Gaskin, and two library media specialists, Karen Levy and Michael Dodes, to meet Chris and Ron and to be welcomed into the Teachers Teaching Teachers/Youth Voices community of educators. At the time, these teachers were a day away from finishing a 3-week Summer Institute with the New York City Writing Project. Paul and Shantanu Saha were the facilitators for this Institute.

The teachers from the NYCWP Summer Institute who joined us for the first time on this podcast:
Cheree Himmel, English Teacher, Queens Vocational & Technical High School, Long Island City, Queens
Crystal Gaskin, Special Education Teacher, Queens Vocational & Technical High School, Long Island City Queens

Two librarians, who were also in the NYCWP Summer Institute, and who were not new to TTT:
Karen Levy, Library Media Specialist, Christopher Columbus High School, Bronx
Michael Dodes, Library Media Specialist, samuel Gompers Career/Technonogy Ed High School, Bronx

Old Friends of Teachers Teaching Teachers and Youth Voices who joined us:
Chris Sloan, Judge Memorial Catholic High School , Salt Lake City, Utah,
Ron Link, Assistant Principal of Organization, Academy for Scholarship and Entrepreneurship, Bronx, NY

The conversation meanders from Crystal imagining ways to use cell phones in her classroom to new attitudes that Cheree is adopting to prepare for bringing more technology into her classroom. Ron and Paul talk about some of the "hard looks" that leaders in schools need to take when thinking about professional development that allows teachers the time they need to bring technology into their classrooms. Chris and Paul talk about the many ways they are re-thinking their curriculum and use of Youth Voices this Fall. Michael Dodes leads the group in two more conversations, one about Library Databases and another about Creative Commons, Fair Use, Inline Linking and Public Domain images.

We hope that this conversation feels like an invitation. We'd love for you to join our small group of far-flung educators, and connect your students with ours this coming school year.

For this podcast, we invited five New York City educators who, at the time, were in the middle of a 3-week Summer Institute with the New York City Writing Project. Paul Allison and Shantanu Saha were the facilitators for this Institute in which participants were invited to:

Spend 12 days this summer with other New York City Writing Project teachers who use technology in their classrooms. Share the ways we use the Internet to make student-to-student connections. Learn about a curriculum currently being developed and collaborated on by teachers across the nation. Explore how we use blogs, wikis, images, videos, podcasts, and other tools to inspire young people to do research into their own questions.

These are five of the teachers who joined us:

• Charlie Freij, Technology/English Teacher, East Brooklyn Community High School
• Doug Condon, Art Teacher, Academy of American Studies in Queens
• Julio Benitez, English Teacher, High School for Construction Trades, Engineering, and Architecture, Queens
• Karen Levy, Library Media Specialist, Christopher Columbus High School, Bronx
• Michael Dodes, Library Media Specialist, samuel Gompers Career/Technonogy Ed High School, Bronx

We also had a wonderful surprise guest, Suzie Boss. Just before going live with this webcast (that is recorded here as a podcast), Paul noticed that Suzie Boss was online in Skype. Since we had been talking about her book earlier in the day, Paul took a chance and invited Suzie to join them. What an thoughful, supportive, informed guest she was!

And that's not all. We were also joined by Mike from Central Texas. He's been teaching for 40 years, using inquiry, Great Books Discussions, and the New Jersey Writing Project (in Texas) as his touchstones, and recently he has been exploring Web 2.0 tools. This was his first skype call.

How wonderful it was to add these names to our list of guests:

• Suzie Boss, co-author (with Jane Krauss) of Reinventing Project-Based Learning: Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age
• Mike, a 40-year veteran history teacher from Central Texas

Please enjoy the podcast. Find out what happens in a tech-focused Advanced/Open Summer Institute in the New York City Writing Project.

Click Read more to see a transcript of a chat that was happening during the webcast.

Join three of the facilitators of Youth Voices, Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, and Chris Sloan in a conversation with each other and five other teachers who have recently begun to use the site (or plan to soon):

• Carolyn Stanley, a tech integrator in Conneticut
• Sherry Edwards, an English teacher Washington
• Fred Haas, an English teacher in a school near Boston
• Jennifer Bahle (now Razor), an English teacher in Omaha
• Michael Dodes, a librarian in the Bronx.

As we begin to plan for the coming fall semester, we talk about some of the things that went well, some of our common goals, some things we don't agree with, some new possibilities in our work together.

Listen to this podcast to learn more about what we talk about when we talk about Youth Voices. If you might want to have your students work on this school-based social network, this might be a good way to find out what our community of teachers and students is all about.

These videos also help fill in some of our thinking:

View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

These videos, along with the podcast, and the chat log (below) might whet your appetite for joining us this fall in Youth Voices.

Click Read more to see a transcript of a chat that was happening during the webcast.

On this podcast, our guest host, Kevin Hodgson helped to wrap up the third episode of a Teachers Teaching Teachers 3-part series that centerd on the book Kevin helped to edit (and contributed a chapter to) called Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change and Assessment in the 21st Century Classroom.

On June 10, TTT hosts Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim interviewed the editors about the project, which looks at changes in the writing classroom through the lens of technology and assessment. (listen to the podcast of that show over at TTT#155). In the second show in this series, on June 17, TTT156, Paul turned the host reins over to Kevin as he chatted with some of the chapter writers about the concept of collaboration in the technology-infused classroom.

In this podcast, as Kevin once again graciously agreed to host the show, we looked at the concept of audience and technology is opening up new doors for publication and expanding audiences and what that does to writing in the classroom.

Chapter authors Dawn Reed, high school teacher and teacher-consultant with the Red Cedar Writing Project; Troy Hicks, associate Professor and director of the Chippewa Writing Project; and Bryan Crandall, high school teacher and a teacher-consultant with the Louisville Writing Project, shared examples of their classroom practices to prompt a discussion about audience in writing using digital technology. The topics they discussed included high school students using multimodal ways of writing in a speech class and an example of what happens when you take the senior project “digital.”  In addition, Marva Solomon joined us to talk about her work with a small group of struggling elementary school writers. The title of her chapter is “True adventures of Students “Writing Online: Mummies, Vampires and schnauzers, Oh My!”

Please enjoy the podcast, and add a comment with your story about how writing is changing in your classroom.

This podcast is the third of three Teachers Teaching Teachers shows in June that focused on this book. On TTT#155 (June 10) we had the editors of the book. Next for TTT#156 (June 17), we had authors from the different chapters of Teaching the New Writing on the show.

Click Read more to see a transcript of a chat that was happening during the webcast.

Glen Bledsoe, Jeff Schwartz, and Paul Allison are interviewed by Kevin Hodgson on this podcast. We talked about collaboration and the tools we use to collaborate in the classroom.

Here’s how the National Writing Project described what we would be talking about on this show.

As educators move forward into the terrain of digital literacy and learning with their students, part of the challenge is balancing the innovation of new technology with the accountability of assessment.

The recently published book Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21st-Century Classroom explores these balancing acts through case studies of elementary through university-level classrooms where teachers are integrating technology with writing and where the assessment of the digital work and student learning is being explored.

Chapter authors Paul Allison, a high school teacher, technology liaison at the New York City Writing Project, and facilitator of TTT; Glen Bledsoe, an elementary teacher and teacher consultant at the Oregon Writing Project at the University of Oregon; and Jeff Schwartz, high school teacher and member of the Bread Loaf Teachers Network, will share examples of their classroom practices to prompt a discussion about the collaborative nature of writing when using technology in the classroom.

Please enjoy the podcast, and add a comment with your story about how writing is changing in your classroom.

This podcast is the second of three Teachers Teaching Teachers shows this month that focused on this book. On TTT#155 (June 10) we interviewed the editors of this book. On TTT#157 (June 24), we had various authors from the different chapters of Teaching the New Writing on the show.

Click Read more to see a transcript of a chat that was happening during the webcast.