74:55 minutes (17.13 MB)

Imagine, if you would, your department meeting webcast live every month or so. At it's core, that's what we aim for at Teachers Teaching Teachers, and there's more. In this podcast, we go back to the basics, back to the making public our private curriculum discussions. Five National Writing Project teachers and two guests joined together to check what our students were doing and what we were thinking. We work together with a group of sites:

• Youth Voices social network of 9th - 12 grade bloggers
• Personal Learning Space - social network of 6th - 8th grade bloggers
• Elggplans Wikispace - a wiki where we gather collaborative plans
• Youthwiki Wikispace- a wiki for youths to share multimedia in galleries of work
• Youth Bridges - youth podcasting network
• Youth Twitter - a safe, twitter-like blogging network for students

The curriculum we build together is beginning to be gathered together in places like these:

• 10 self 10 world questions
• 12 steps to a post with image, comments, and reflection
• Be a blogger - Self Assessment Guide
• Be a blogger! - Hypertext version

On this podcast Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim, from New York City were joined by:

• Chris Sloan, Salt Lake City, Utah
• Bill O'Neal, Trenton, New Jersey
• Lynne Culp, Los Angeles, California
• Mike Sansone, Iowa
• Jim Sigler, Missouri

Enjoy!

Chat Log

68:12 minutes (31.23 MB)

Even though we had a change in plans....we had great discussions about podcasting, moodle, and drupal.  Thanks to all for joining.  Leave a comment here in podomatic - to introduce yourself.

52:10 minutes (23.88 MB) ­This was a special webcast from the National Writing Project's (NWP) ­Tech Matters`07 -- an annual summer institute sponsored by the Tech Liaisons Network of the NWP. In addition to several teachers who are working together in Chico, CA as part of Tech Matters, we were joined by Writing Project teachers Bill O'Neil (Trenton WP) and Bud Hunt (Colorado State University WP). Also two Writing Project teachers who were participants in Tech Maters`06 joined us, Donna Bragg, Penn State Lehigh Valley Writing Project and Lynne Culp, UCLA Writing Project. Thanks also to Susan Ettenheim who streamed for us and edited this podcast, Lee Baber who added more music to our lives, and Doug Symington who was there to remind us about his show EdTech Brainstorms, which on on Thursdays nights(Americas)/Friday (Asia,Oceania) 2amGMT.

35:17 minutes (32.31 MB)

Joining Paul Allison (NYC), Lee Baber (Virginia), and Susan Ettenheim (NYC) on this show were two new voices on Teachers Teaching Teachers and one regular guest (with a side of him we haven't seen before):

Karen McComas was finally able to join us. (She has had a class on Wednesday evenings.) Karen is Associate Professor of Communication Disorders at Marshall University, in West Virginia. She is an ASHA-certified Speech-Language Pathologist and Audiologist. Karen also serves as the Chair of the Technology Liaison Leadership Team of the National Writing Project and as a Teacher Consultant for the Marshall University Writing Project . For her, writing is an historical and political act. She writes to understand and preserve the story of her life. She has also been an inspiration for teaching with technology in the National Writing Project for many years. Here's Karen's blog ...in mind's eye...

Betty D. Collum was able to get on using her cell phone. Betty is a 5th/6th writing teachers in Webster County Schools, Eupora, Mississippi. She is also the Mississippi State University Writing Project Tech Liaison, and a member of the National Writing Project's Tech Liaison Leadership Team. This year Betty's students have been contributors to a podcasting project that includes teachers and their students from all over the country, Youth Radio: Connecting Youth Voices to the World.

Bill O'Neal also joined us. Bill has worked with us for several months on YouthVoices.org. He is an English teacher at Trenton Central High School, West, and he is the Tech Liaison for the Trenton Writing Project. After show #58 (06.20.07), Bill wanted us to know that he also has a life in music! When we asked if we could highlight his website about his musical life he wrote:

"The music on my site has little to do with education... but whatever. This fall I am, however, reviving a guitar workshop for the students. I limited enrollment to eight. The district sent us to a weekend workshop (a few NYC teachers also attended) for a not-for-profit group called Little Kids Rock. They will provide the guitars. Lack of instruments was my biggest hurdle the last time I ran a workshop: Very few students owned guitars. Their web site is: http://littlekidsrock.org."

Bill's music site is: www.billoneal.com

Enjoy this a low-key, summer show. We recorded this webcast in the middle of electrical storms that kept knocking out our Skype connections, something you will probably barely notice because of Susan Ettenheim's amazing editing skills!

Please add a story of your own about something that you did in your classroom this year, something that you want to do better in the fall... or something that you want to continue doing.

53:08 minutes (24.32 MB)

 

At the end of this webcast, which features the five teachers involved with the International Teen Life Project, Scott S. Floyd, a teacher from the White Oak ISD and the Tech Liaison for the Bluebonnet Writing Project in Texas, USA asked, "What's one thing that teachers who want to get involved in a global project should keep in mind?" Clarence Fisher, a 7/8 teacher from Snow Lake, Manitoba, Canada began his answer with one word, "Planning... " This only made sense, because the International Teen Life Project that Clarence organized with four colleagues from around the world this last winter and spring is a model for how to go about planning a global project for middle school students. In January 2007, just as "the fun" was about to begin, Clarence wrote about this work in his blog:

In the middle of December, a small group of teachers, Kim Cofino and Jabiz Raisdana from Kuala Lumpur, Jamie Hide from Columbia, Lee Baber from Virginia, and myself began putting our heads together about more intense ways to bring students together. All being middle school teachers, we came up with the idea for a project that would focus our students around examining and reflecting on their own lives first and the lives of other people their age in their nation. From here, we want the kids to think globally and look at the lives and the concerns of people their own age in other parts of the globe.... While we are just beginning off, I am truly excited about this project.We are bringing together so many things: blogging, Skype, wikis, videoconferencing, podcasting, digital storytelling, etc in one place that is truly a new literacies sandbox!

Remote Access: International Teen Life

55:02 minutes (37.79 MB)­

Our guest hosts on this podcast were Troy Hicks and Dawn Reed from the Red Cedar Writing Project! Here’s how they describe their work:

As podcasting has become a part of our language arts classes, weave seen first hand the ways in which it gives students an audience for their work. By its very nature, podcasting is an oral phenomenon and while it involves the writing process, examining the production rebroadcasts as a speech act also merits our attention. We, Dawn Reed and Troy Hicks, have been interested in how podcasting — because of its ability to record, edit, and revise oral language as well as to time-shift content — can be used as an extension of speech class in high school.

Our project this spring attempted to engaging students in responsible, ethical,and productive composing activities thorough blogging and podcasting. We set out to study how creating and publishing a podcast modeled on NPR’s This I Believe essays could change the composing process for students. In so doing, Dawn’s students created and published their own podcasts, and the two of us discovered a few things about our own technology skills, the school infrastructure, and students’ ability to rise to the occasion that we would like to share with you.

Also, we would like to discuss three ideas that we began our project with and think about how these were actualized:

1. To understand how blogging and podcasting can be considered a part of Michigan’s new “online experience” for high school students and, rather than take a class fully online, teachers might incorporate elements of digital writing into the irregular classroom work.
2. To consider themes that emerge from a project like this and how a K-12/university research team can better understand those themes through collaboration.
3. To reconsider how teaching “speech,” a curricular partner to composition, changes when the media for production includes podcasting.In that sense, we will discuss how purposes and genres change, as well as the affordances and constraints of podcasting, both from technical and pedagogical perspectives.

Join us in the conversation! Add a comment here.

38:36 minutes (17.68 MB)

EdTechTalk: 21st Century Learning #43
One Year Anniversary and Jeff Lebow from Worldbridges
May 15, 2007

This week we celebrated our one year anniversary, woot! We have managed to get to our 43rd episode, only taking a few weeks off for vacation last summer. We reflect on what it has been like, and bring in our mentor Jeff Lebow, founder of Worldbridges to discuss 21st Century Learning and EdTechTalk.com

We also discussed the recent NY Times article about schools getting rid of their laptop programs. We gave some of our own critiques and discussed how schools could be more successful with 1:1 initiatives. 

Next week, we'll be discussing faculty professional development with Jeff Ritter, from St. John's School in Houston Texas. See you all then.

To contact us, please submit a comment on this post or send us e-mail at 21 [at] edtechtalk.com.

67:58 minutes (31.12 MB)

We were joined on this wide-ranging podcast by 6th grade teacher and Western Mass. Writing Project tech liaison, Kevin Hodgson and Area 3 (California) Writing Project tech liaison Gail Desler, as well as Ken Stein, a high school teacher in New York City who is just beginning to bring his students into YouthVoices.net. We talk about podcasts, blogging, and many other 21st Century literacies. And we are joined by many others, including Alice Mercer, also from Northern California. In the end we welcomed teachers from New York, Massachusetts, California, Virginia, Florida, and Taiwan. We invite you to also join the conversation!

Kevin passed along these links that he mentioned about their Making Connections project (which is closed to the public):

A report about Making Connections blog project

Student Surveys

 Teacher Reflections

The night before she started her Spring Semester classes at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in New York City, Susan Ettenheim participated in a dialogue via skype with teachers from four different Writing Projects: Paul Allison (NYC), Matt Makowetski (South Coast, CA), Bill O’Neal (Trenton, NJ), and Bob LeVin (Area 3 in CA). This is a podcast of that conversation.

Along with Chris Sloan in Salt Lake City (Utah WP), the six of us are beginning a complex, exciting collaboration with our students in an elgg, YouthVoices.net. Listen as we plan, take a look at Susan’s introduction to her students, and consider joining us. You might leave a comment here, then go over to YouthVoices and see what all the excitement is about.

Writing like the post that we’ve copied here makes it easy to listen to what our students think about our work with them. Here’s what a 9th grader in Chris Sloan’s class thinks about blogging at YouthVoices.net:

What makes a good blog post, by Parker at Judge Memorial High School, Salt Lake City

To create a really good blog post, I really think that people need to open up to the readers. Honesty is most effective, because the actual emotion that others put down is probably something that others have experienced, or can relate to. For example, i just read a letter a girl wrote to her father, but he passed away four years ago. It was the most personal, morose, true example of sadness that i have ever read, let alone on youthvoices. I don’t know anything like that personally, but the raw openness made it something that i felt, not just read. I’ve also published some poems on the site, and i’ve gotten some varied, but positive, responses to those, and that’s encouraging.   more below

 Teachers Teaching Teachers #35
January 10, 2007
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This was the kind of conversation that needed more time. Listen as nine teachers from six states — Paul Allison, NY, Lee Baber, VA , Glen Bledsoe, OR, Susan Ettenheim, NY, Kevin Hodgson, MA, Eric Hoefler, VA, Matt Makowetski, CA, Chris Sloan, UT, and Ken Stein, NY (plus a father from China) — who use blogs, discussion boards, and other Web-based communication tools in their classrooms tell stories about the first half of the academic year. We report on what we have been learning about blogging (and using wikis) with students. We also begin to talk about what our plans are for the remainder of the year.

Take a look at our ever expanding Google Notebook for this show: Teachers Teaching Teachers 01.10.07

In the comments at the bottom of this post, please join us with your thoughts about what you’ve learned teaching students to communicate online. What are your stories? Let’s see how many more states — and countries — we can add to the list as we check in with colleagues from all over the globe.

We also want to talk about how to help students who will be ending their classes with us in January can find some closure with their blogs without closing off the possiblities of keeping an ongoing blog.

Has writing really changed? What’s the difference — really — between writing an essay and writing a blog post? Has the use of images really changed the writing process? Digital technologies are great, but don’t we still have to teach kids how to write the way we always did? What’s the difference?

A show about the webcasting process. If you're interested is learning to webcast, go to WebcastAcademy.net

Next week, we'll be discussing community portals and open source software with Richard Kassissieh from http://www.kassblog.com/

Teachers Teaching Teachers
Do we need a new discipline: Stories of Student Online Conversation
October 18, 2006
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Our conversation this evening began innocently enough with Gail Desler, the technology liaison for the Area 3 Writing Project in and around Sacramento, California, describing her work over the past four years with blogging in the classroom. Last year 3 different Writing Projects and 5 schools joined together in a project called “Youth Voices: Coast to Valley.” Given that we have stolen their name, “Youth Voices” in an attempt to broaden our network of schools, we are delighted to include Gail and her teachers in the elgg at http://youthvoices.net! Last night Gail said that some of the same teachers from last year’s work would be joining the new Youth Voices. A great question that Gail has been asking is, “How can we sustain and deepen online conversations on a blog?” And part of this has to do with finding the right balance between personal blogging and common blogging around a theme or text.