Teachers whose students post at Youth Voices are pretty excited about the “Mapping Main Street” collaborative project.

“Mapping Main Street is a collaborative documentary media project that creates a new map of the country through stories, photos and videos recorded on actual Main Streets. We invite you to capture the stories and images of the country today. Use our Main Street map to find streets named Main close to your home or along the paths of your own travels. Go out, look around, talk to people, and contribute to this re-mapping of the United States.” 

Mapping Main Street » About

Listen to this podcast, recorded on September 16, to learn more about how we are working “Mapping Main Street" into our curriculum. You will also to learn more about a wonderful youth development program, Radio Rookies and their Short Wave workshop, where producers train students the basics of reporting, interviewing, and script writing, and in 1.5 months they produce a final story for the Radio Rookies web site.” One of our guests for this podcast was Sanda Htyte.

Sanda Htyte is Radio Rookies Associate Producer. She has been with Radio Rookies since interning at the Elmhurst workshop in summer of 2005. She is also a freelance video producer, director, editor and a CUNY Professor. While interning at Radio Rookies, Sanda was completing her MFA in documentary producing. Having studied both video and radio production at her Alma Mata, Brooklyn College, CUNY, she was asked to teach introduction to radio production as Adjunct Professor in Fall of 2006 as well as Spring 2007.

A couple of years ago Woody Woodgate, up in Alaska, helped shape our curriculum toward place-based projects. His work with the students at the Marshall School was an inspiration. He helped amplify the voices of the young people in his classes so that all of us on the Youth Voices network could hear and respond!

Another guest on this podcast was a colleague of Woody’s from Alaska, Diane (Ginger) Crockett. Chris Sloan joined us as well from Salt Lake City Utah. (Check out his students’ work on the Mapping Main Street site.)

We would love to make similar connections with your students this year. Specifically, in the next couple of months, we are looking at braiding some or our “place-based” photography, stories, VoiceThreads, videos, podcasts… with the NPR-connected project, “Mapping Main Street.” It just seems to us like this could be an excellent opportunity for students to show off their home towns, their cultures, their stories — and to see what is similar and different from other youths’ Main Streets.

Interested? Please plan to join us at Youth Voices.

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

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we talk about important changes (improvements, we hope) that we’ve been making to our Drupal site for students, Youth Voices.  We invited teachers who are using Youth Voices this year. Listen to find out what how they are planning to use this social networking site with their students this coming year.

Youth Voices is much more than a web site. It is a community of teachers, working together to concoct a collaborative curriculum that supports our students in peer-to-peer online discussion. Chris Sloan, Paul Allison, and Susan Ettenheim started working together on this project in 2003. As we begin the 2009-2010 school year, we are excited to invite you and many more teachers into this work.

We are in the process of making several important changes to Youth Voices. Here are a couple:

• Collaborative Curriculum: http://youthvoices.net/curriculum — We’re building it now. Join us!
• The guides http://youthvoices.net/guides have been updated, organized… and there is more work needed here.
• There are now three main ways for students to add Discussions to the site - See under Add a Discussion.

There is more! But that’s probably enough for now. Please enjoy this podcast. It's one of our "staff meeting" podcasts where we make public the planning that used to be done in private. If you are interested, we would love to work with you and your students this year. Just join the site, and let us know.

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.