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Andrea Zellner

Teachers Teaching Teachers #281 - National Writing Project Teachers Ready to Celebrate Digital Learning Day on Feb 1 - 1.25.12


61:56 minutes (14.18 MB)
This conversation about #NWP teachers in the National Digital Learning Day continued the next day at NWP Radio - on Blog Talk Radio: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/nwp_radio/2012/01/27/digital-writing-matters

What are your plans for National Digital Learning Day #DLDay on February 1, 2012? http://digitalis.nwp.org/site-blog/what-are-your-plans-national-digital-lea/3369

Enjoy this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, recorded a week before the big day.

+Paul Oh helped us invite this amazing list of guests. They are listed below, along with one thing we've asked them in our conversation about Digital Learning Day.

+Natalie Bernasconi, Central California Writing Project and middle school teacher; presenting the Digital ID wiki http://digital-id.wikispaces.com/Welcome as part of California Digital Learning Day presentations in Sacramento on Feb. 1

+Gail Desler, Area 3 Writing Project and Instructional Technologist in Elk Grove, California; also presenting the Digital ID wiki as part of Digital Learning Day presentations in Sacramento

+Andrea Zellner, Red Cedar Writing Project, doc student at Michigan State University, who is working with Michigan State’s MA in Ed Tech program to “try something new” and document; artifacts from and about the experiences will be found here: http://dlday2012.tumblr.com/

+Leigh Wolf, Program Director for the MA in Ed Tech Program, is coordinating efforts with Andrea; here’s a link to a post at Leigh’s bloghttp://www.leighgraveswolf.com about Digital Learning Day.

+Tom Fox, Northern California Writing Project & National Writing Project, English Professor at Chico State University, will be presenting digital compositions created by his students at the Digital Learning Day presentations in Sacramento

+Jack Zangerle, Hudson Valley Writing Project, 8th Grade ELA teacher in Dover, NY, doing things for Digital Learning Day in his classroom

+Matt Dunleavy, former Tech Liaison of the Tidewater Writing Project in Virginia, and a professor at Radford University, currently working with Chris Dede from Harvard on an Augmented Reality project called EcoMobile, which will be presented in D.C. on Feb. 1 as part of Digital Learning Day activities there.

More on Digital Learning Day: http://www.digitallearningday.org


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Teachers Teaching Teachers #272 - City as Floor Plan with Ron Link, Andrea Zellner, Mary Ann Reilly, and David Wees - 11.16.11


55:16 minutes (12.65 MB) teachers272

In a busy week with conferences and conventions--physical and and online--going on all over, it was good to stop and think about what we want schools to look like. On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, Paul Allison introduces his Assistant Principal, colleague and friend Ron Link to Monika Hardy and Mary Ann Reilly. Ron is cooking up ideas for a new school, and many of his thoughts have seemed parallel to some of what Monika and Mary Ann have been talking about at labconnections.blogspot.com. Andrea Zellner and David Wees are always a delight to hear from! Enjoy this conversation, and let's keep talking about what we want schools to look like. Joining this episode are: monika hardy,  Ron Link,  Andrea Zellner,  Mary Ann Reilly,  David Wees, and Paul Allison


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Teachers Teaching Teachers #241 - Why we love the National Writing Project and why Federal funding is important - 3.30.11


59:58 minutes (27.45 MB)

Several leaders in the National Writing Project--Paul Oh, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and Troy Hicks--joined us from Washington DC where they were working to lobby members of Congress today, Thursday, March 31.

Also Chad Sansing, Zac Chase, and Andrea Zellner joined us on the Skype conversation--as well as many friends in the chat. Chad has been organizing a blogging effort going on around the country.  Here’s what he is asking supporters of the NWP to do:
Please add your voice to the chorus of educators from around the country who are blogging in support of the NWP. We’re trying to accumulate 1,000 blog posts by April 8, when the next Continuing Resolution for the federal budget expires. There are already nearly 150 posts - moving stories of the impact of the NWP on the lives of teachers and students - at the archive: http://coopcatalyst.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/the-blog4nwp-archive/ You can tweet or email your blog post URL to Chad Sansing (twitter: @chadsansing; email: csansing@gmail.com) who has been organizing this effort, or post it to this discussion and we’ll make sure it gets added to the archive. Remember to try to tag your posts with: #blog4nwp. FYI, we’ve gotten a few responses on twitter to this effort from the press office of the Department of Education (see: http://www.andrea-zellner.com/archives/629 and http://aetweets.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/blog4nwp-and-being-bossy/), so let’s keep it up! Check out what folks have written to get an idea of what you might add but more importantly take a few minutes to add your story (stories).

Listen to find out what we can do to help restore funding to the National Writing Project. Then find your own ways to add your voice the the the chorus singing praises to the National Writing Project!

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Teachers Teaching Teachers #229 - How do we become more effective online educators--for students and other teachers? 12.15.10


64:55 minutes (14.86 MB)

If you wanted to talk about online education, who better would you like to sit down with than these four educators:

pe-davecormierDave Cormier

Photo_on_2011-12-28_at_13.48__2_reasonably_smallAndrea Zellner

main-thumb-434715-100-sN3LK0iSEklBVhLiOZyNYZ8t4Yu60KG8Fred Haas

Zac Chase zac_chase





That's what Susan Ettenheim and Paul Allison had the privilege of doing on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers. Enjoy!

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Teachers Teaching Teachers #212 - A community of teachers building "Voices on the Gulf" - 08.04.10


41:26 minutes (9.48 MB)

As you will hear on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we are very excited about the new website, http://voicesonthegulf.org ! On this podcast we are joined by:

We are putting together a team to help us to develop this site — and fast. We've set up the following Community Managers:

David Pulling (Louisiana) - Site Manager
Paul Allison (New York) - Site Manager

Catherine Tibbs (Mississippi) - Art and Humanities
Ellen Steigman (Louisiana) - Art and Humanities
Susan Ettenheim (New York) - Art and Humanities

Paige Baggett (Alabama) - Community and Culture
Suzie Boss (Oregon) - Community and Culture

Jeff Mason (Florida) - Health and Wellness
Andrea Zellner (Michigan) - Health and Wellness

Natasha Whitton (Louisiana) - Money and Careers
Chris Sloan (Utah) - Money and Careers

Alicia Blair (Mississippi) - Nature and the Environment
Matt Montagne (California) - Nature and the Environment

Kyle Meador (Louisiana) - Social Issues and Human Rights
Diana Laufenberg (Pennsylvania) - Social Issues and Human Rights

Stacey Ferguson (Mississippi) - Our Space (K-6)
Margaret Simon (Louisiana) - Our Space (K-6)
Gail Desler (California) -  Our Space (K-6)
Kevin Hodgson (Massachusetts) - Our Space (K-6)

Along with this growing group of National Writing Project teachers, teachers from along the Gulf Coast, teachers in Edutopia’s pblcmp, AND/OR teachers involved with the EdTechTalk/WorldBridges community, we have been organizing (and working with Bill Fitzgerald at FunnyMonkey) to build this site that will do the following:

  1. Provide a place where we can collect, amplify, and engage the poems, stories, and essays that students along the Gulf Coast bring to their teachers this month, as schools open.
  2. Layer these stories, poems, and essays with online sources, including news releases and poetry (such as the poems on Poets for Living Waters).
  3. We don’t know yet! Many of us have been working for some time on building a site like Voices on the Gulf, and we have some idea what directions this will take, AND we want to allow the discussions on the site to help us know how to develop.

The most important item, above is #1 - we are working as fast and hard as possible to get the site out to teachers, and for it to be easy to use. If you would like to add a poem, thought, or anything, please sign up, then once you’ve been made into a member, you’ll see the Add Discussion button. Please go in and write a brief reflection, add  photo, a video, or almost anything — just to see how easy it is to do. AGAIN, THANKS!

Students have been coming back the past couple of weeks in many Gulf Coast schools. A lot of our connections with teachers on the Gulf have happened this summer on a live webcast that we do every Wednesday evening. You may have already been on the show. We would love it if you would come back. We’ve been able to make a lot of invaluable connections. You can see what we mean here: http://edtechtalk.com/teachersteachingteachers

We would love to invite you to join us on Teachers Teaching Teachers every Wednesday at 6:00 p.m. Pacific / 8:00 p.m. Central / 9:00 p.m. Eastern. If you use Skype, please email Paul Allison or Susan Ettenheim and let us know your Skype name (again)— just helps us to know who to look for! We hope that you will be able to join us soon on a Wednesday evening.

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Teachers Teaching Teachers #207 "We've been taken over once again by something that we couldn't stop, can't stop." - 06.30.10


50:32 minutes (11.57 MB)

This the fourth week of a summer series in which we have focused Teachers Teaching Teachers on the BP Gulf Oil Spill. Our guests included:

  • Matt Montagne, who has been collecting materials, such as: October 28th, 2010 TEDxOILSPILL Talks. The Google Doc that Matt can be found at http://tinyurl.com/voicesonthegulf - And stay tuned! There much more to come under the domain: "VoicesOnTheGulf." (We also eventually agreed on the common tags: "voicesonthegulf" and "edoilspill"
  • Diana Laufenberg, a history teacher from Science Leadership Academy who joined us on this topic 3 weeks ago will try (from her family’s farm) to join us again.
  • Natasha Whitton, one of the three teachers from the Southeastern Louisiana Writing Project two weeks ago, hopes to join us again
  • Andrea Zellner, a biology and English teachers from the Red Cedar Writing Project in Michigan will be with us again!
  • AND NEW to our webcast: Catherine Tibbs, a former high school English teacher who works for the Live Oak Writing Project in Mississippi joined us. (She is also invited colleagues who will be heard on future podcasts. Catherine wrote this on a Monday late in June :
     I don’t know if you know this or not, but oil reached the MS beaches this weekend. We had been fortunate so far to avoid this mess. From what I understand from the media, the manpower was not coordinated in the Gulf to skim the oil that is now reaching us. Isn’t that always the case?
  • Also new to the podcast is Jeff Mason from Penscola, Florida, a biology and technology teacher. We met a Twitter, and we look forward to a continuing connection. (Jeff came on the webcast last week as well, so look for more from him on future podcasts.)

We hope you will be able to join us in this ongoing project. Help us know how to respond as teachers—and with our students—to this monster that will continue to reek havoc for weeks? months? to come!

Join us to talk about what's happening in the gulf every Wednesday at http://EdTechTalk.com/live at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA (World Times). 

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Teachers Teaching Teachers #206 - Will our students find the oil spill compelling? 3rd in a series - 06.23.10


41:57 minutes (9.6 MB)

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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Teachers Teaching Teachers #205 -Three teachers from Louisiana talk about a dull ache - 2nd in a series - 06.16.10


45:36 minutes (10.44 MB)

Obama seems to have missed another opportunity in a major address that he gave about the BP oil spill last month (June 15). Earlier he was right to call the Gulf Oil Disaster our environmental 9/11. Both are life-changing disasters that have many of us asking where we need to stop compromising.

On Teachers Teaching Teachers this summer, we are asking what needs to change in our schools and in our lives as teachers. We hope that Thomas L. Friedman’s comments in May 2010 won’t be the last word on the 9/11 comparison. “Sept. 11, 2001, was one of those rare seismic events that create the possibility to energize the country to do something really important and lasting that is too hard to do in normal times.”

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we talked about what we can do now that we might not have done before this disaster or failure. This is the second of a series of shows we will be doing on the Gulf oil disaster.

In the previous podcast (TTT 204), we had a thoughtful, productive conversation with history teacher Diana Laufenberg about responses in our curriculum to the Gulf Oil Disaster.  One of her ideas was to set up Skype connections for our students with people in Gulf states to personalize and more deeply understand the impact of this ongoing disaster. To move this idea forward, we were joined by teacher-consultants from the Southeastern Louisiana Writing Project  — Carolyn Kirk, Tasha Whitton, and Ellen Steigman — on this podcast.

On this podcast, we wre also be joined by teachers Matt Montagne and Andrea Zellner — two of our favorite angry, young environmentalists!

Won’t you join us too? We will continue our conversations about what needs to change all summer on Teachers Teaching Teachers. We want to know what you are thinking. Join us in the chat room or get ready to join us on Skype at http://EdTechTalk.com/live at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA Wednesdays / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times

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Teachers Teaching Teachers #191 - Katherine Schulten and the Learning Network AND "...making the case for the NWP - 03.10.10


67:03 minutes (15.35 MB)

In the first half of thKS1larger.jpgis weeks episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we had an inspiring conversation with Katherine Schulten editor of The Learning Network at the New York Times.  Our theme for this week's Teachers Teaching Teachers was about increasing teacher voice in public debates. Katherine suggested how we might use The Learning Network for that.

In addition, we were joined by:

  • Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, director of National Programs and Site Development at the National Writing Project, University of California, Berkeley
  • and Andrea Zellner a leader at the Red Cedar Writing Project, Michigan State University's site of the NWP.

Andrea and many o

thers in the chat room during the webcast gave witness to why we want to maintain federal funding for the NWP to continue -- an example of a time wh

en we need to get our voices to be heard! 

"It's been a heady week for teaching and learning discussion on the Times site," writes Katherine Schulten, our first guest on this podcast. One of Katherine's jobs as an editor of the New York Times Learning Network is to moderate the comments that come in on education-related articles.

A Student Opinion post from earlier this week, "Where Do You Stand on Unconcealed Handguns? "received many lively responses from "students 13 and older," who "are invited [to the Learning Network] to comment on questions about issues in the news."

If you just clicked on those links, your head is probably spinning: so many issues so little time! That's what it feels like to have a conversation with Katherine Schulten, who before she became an editor for the Learning Network was a NYC teacher and a consultant for the New York City Writing Project. Katherine was worried that she was talking too much, because she is so excited about managing the Learning Network.

We'll turned Katherine loose, then we interrupted her with a few questions. We think you'l learn a lot about the New York Times Learning Network on this podcast:

Currently, they are offering these features:

  • Lesson Plans — Daily lesson plans based on New York Times content.
  • Student Opinion — News-related questions that invite response from students age 13 and older.
  • Word of the Day — Vocabulary words in the context of recent Times articles.
  • 6 Q’s About the Newss — An activity in which students answer basic questions (Who, What, Where, When, Why and How) about an article.
  • News Quiz — Interactive daily news quizzes on current top stories.
  • Student Crossword — Topical puzzles geared toward teens.

The award-winning Learning Network was created in the fall of 1998. In October 2009, they re-launched it as a Times blog.

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