Chris Sloan

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers -- the third in our summer series on the Gulf oil failure -- Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim are joined by Chris Sloan and Andrea Zeller. We talk about building curriculum around the Gulf oil spill and other topics, wondering how to keep student self-motivated inquiry at the center of our work while also introducing topics such as the environment, art history, obesity, AP English, or the earthquake in Haiti and other current events.

• Chris Sloan teaches at Judge Memorial Catholic High School in Salt Lake City, and he is a member of the Wasatch Range Writing Project. He teaches digital photography, media studies and AP English. Chris, Paul and Susan and their students have been working together on a school-based social network, Youth Voices for the last six years.
   
• Andrea Zellner has been a frequent guest on TTT this summer, we are delighted to say! Andrea is a former high school teacher in Michigan, who taught both English and Biology. Currently Andrea works for the Red Cedar Writing Project.
   
• Susan Ettenheim teaches at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in New York City. Susan and Paul have been doing Teachers Teaching Teachers together for almost five years. Susan teaches computer arts, art, and digital photography, and she is the librarian as well. This year Susan is also teaching a Caribbean Art History course for the Virtual High School.
   
• Paul Allison teaches at the East-West School of International Studies in Flushing, Queens. He is also the Tech Liaison for the New York City Writing Project. Paul teaches English and he started a school/community garden this spring.

We hope you enjoy this conversation between four veteran teachers. Just as we build on each others ideas, we hope you build on ours and let us know what you are thinking in the comments below.

We invite you to join us each Wednesday this summer to listen to teachers from the Gulf and to hear how teachers are planning to bring these issues into their classrooms this fall.

Join us at http://EdTechTalk.com/live at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA Wednesdays / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times

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For this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we asked Suzie Boss to come on to help us have a conversation with:

• an amazing young high school student who has developed his own project-based learning by creating info-graphics.
• a dynamic teacher who has been working all year to help open a new public school in East Brooklyn.

We learned a lot, both about visualizing information and about integrating technology into a new, alternative school.

Michael, Amazing Student
Chris Sloan joined us with one of his amazing students, Michael, from Judge Memorial High School in Salt Lake City. Michael has a blog called Graph the Info.

Click on this image to see a recent post where Michael explains his creative process:

Charlie, Dynamic Teacher
We were also joined by Charlie Freij a teacher we meet in the New York City Writing Project’s Advanced Summer Institute last year. Charlie has been working this year to create a new school, East Brooklyn Community High School, in Canarsie. And his students have been using Youth Voices.

East Brooklyn Community High School is a small, academically rigorous high school that is committed to preparing students for college, meaningful employment, healthy personal and family relationships and participation in the life of their communities. East Brooklyn Community High School is a transfer school that is designed to help students who have fallen behind in credit accumulation get back on track and earn a high school diploma. East Brooklyn Community HS is a collaboration between the DOE and SCO Family Services; our curriculum and programs build on SCO’s comprehensive range of neighborhood and community based services that sustain families and children. The academic program will utilize innovative and project based instructional strategies that prepare students to pass Regents exams and develop the skills needed for post secondary options.

We hope you enjoy this podcast, and that you will join us each Wednesday this summer as we develop curriculum together that will address the BP Gulf Oil Atrocity.

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Cloud Computing… Collaborative Environments… Game-Based Learning… Mobiles… Augmented Reality… Flexible Displays…

After enjoying and learning from the conversation at Seedlings-2010-05-06 with Lucy Gray and the K12 Horizon Report, we thought we would do a follow-up to their inspiring show. (Thanks Alice, Bob, and Cheryl! And double-thanks to Alice for helping to broadcast this episode.)

Our guests for this podcast were Rachel Smith @nimah and Alan Levine @cogdog vice-presidents of the New Media Consortium. They are the principal writers of the 2010 K-12 Edition of the Horizon Report and they joined us on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers.  We supplemented their descriptions with examples from our classrooms. For example, check out the work fourth-grade teacher Scott Newcomb is doing with smartphones in Ohio.

Are you working on the horizons of change? We’d love to hear your story in the comments below.

Rachel Smith NMC, VP, NMC Services http://www.nmc.org

Rachel S. Smith is the Vice President, NMC Services for the New Media Consortium (NMC), an international consortium of more than 260 world-class universities, colleges, museums, research centers, and technology companies dedicated to using new technologies to inspire, energize, stimulate, and support learning and creative expression. She is recognized for her work in making new technologies approachable for higher education faculty and staff through talks, trainings, and written materials. A specialist in project coordination, user interface design, and visual facilitation, Rachel leads the NMC’s fee-based services units, directs the NMC’s involvement in projects such as the open source Pachyderm project, and directs all NMC internal and external publications. She serves as an interorganizational liaison, bringing together NMC members from around the globe to develop new projects. Rachel authors instructional materials, guides, and monographs on the creative and technical aspects of teaching with technology.

Alan Levine  NMC, Vice President, Community and CTO http://www.nmc.org/

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It’s Spring in the northern hemisphere. Some of us have five or six, others nine weeks left in the academic year. It’s a great time to try out something new or to reflect on what we tried this year. What are you doing this academic season? Listen to this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, then let us know what you are doing this spring.

• You will <fill in the blank>
• Paul Allison and Rachel Smith report on how Evoke is going, perhaps with a student or two.
• Susan Ettenheim and Chris Sloan talk about how their collaborations in digital photography classes are going.
• Matt Montagne and a student discuss Goggle Apps and the plans, at the time, for Earth Day, which was a success again this year.

Photo: Uploaded on April 12, 2010 by AnnaBanana628
 

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What does working in a school-based social network like http://youthvoices.net have to do with getting ready for college? Chris Sloan had a great idea. “Why don’t we invite former students who used Youth Voices and who are now in college to Skype in with their thoughts about what college is like these days … and if Youth Voices maybe does or doesn’t fit with what they are doing now?”

Two of Chris’s former students joined us on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers. Here’s Chris’s more detailed introduction to this week’s podcast:

It’s that time of year again when the seniors I teach are in that bittersweet time; they’re happy to be moving on but sad to leave some things behind.  They’re distracted by plans for the future but also trying to live up to their many commitments.  As their teacher I often wonder whether the things we do in my classes has value, if I’ve prepared them enough for “life after high school.”  So I thought it might be an interesting idea to catch up with some of our former students to see how their first year is wrapping up.  Was college all they dreamed it would be?  Is it better than they imagined? not quite as good?  Did the kind of work they did on Youth Voices, the digital compositions and the collaborative writing, prepare them for the kinds of things they’ve been asked to do this year in college? Judging by the 2010 Horizon Report, I think we’re on the right track, but there’s only one way to find out. 

Here are a couple of Youth Voices alumni who join us on this podcast: Last year Katie appeared a couple of times on TTT, first as part of a discussion about the seniors’ plans for college, TTT 134, Four Young Bloggers Apply to College where she said things like: “I don’t think that as an 18-year old in college, it’s a life or death situation about whether you’ll be successful or not.  The college application process is a stressful thing, but you have to keep it in perspective.”  Katie also appeared on TTT 130, which was an extension of the Youth Voices discussion, “YES WE CAN: my experience in Grant Park on election day.”

We were also joined by Jimin who blogs regularly at Crunchgear in addition to being a student at NYU.  Last year Jimin wrote posts like  All Your Intellectual Property Are Belong to Us, It’s Not Fair, It’s Laissez-Faire!, and used Youth Voices as another way to promote his band Illegal Beagle.

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