youth voices

Teachers Teaching Teachers #93 - Open Curriculum Planning - 02.27.08

Paul Allison — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 19:24:49 -0500

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:

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

Teachers Teaching Teachers #83 - Tagging, Ceramics, Digital Photography, and More

Paul Allison — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 21:55:29 -0600

Listen in as these eight teachers have a wide-ranging conversation during one of their virtual staff meetings, where they discuss their work together.

Paul Allison, East Bronx Academy for the Future, Bronx, NY
Lee Baber, J. Frank Hillyard Middle School, Broadway, VA
Susan Ettenheim, Eleanor Roosevelt High School, New York, NY
Russ Knopp, Preston Hall Middle School, Waitsburg, WA
Matt Montagne, University School of Milwaukee, WI
Bill O'Neal, Trenton High School West, Trenton, NJ
Chris Sloan, Judge Memorial High School, Salt Lake City, UT
Woody Woodgate, Marshall School, Marshall, AK

tagzaniapaste TTT83 tagged map by user - Tagzania

Teachers Teaching Teachers #74 - From Big Ideas to the Nitty-Gritty

Paul Allison — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 14:22:33 -0500

Early in this podcast we were joined by Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach to share with us some of the big ideas and vision behind the K-12 Online Conference 2007:

Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach, a 20-year educator, has been a classroom teacher, charter school principal, district administrator, and digital learning consultant. She currently serves as an adjunct faculty member teaching graduate and undergraduate preservice teachers at The College of William and Mary (Virginia, USA), where she is also completing her doctorate in educational planning, policy and leadership. In addition, Sheryl is co-leading a statewide 21st Century Skills initiative in the state of Alabama, funded by a major grant from the Microsoft Partners in Learning program. Sheryl blogs at (http://21stcenturylearning.typepad.com/blog/).

K12 Online Conference 2007 | About

In the second half of we get into the nitty-gritty of joining the Personal Learning Space (and Youth Voices)with teachers from four different corners of the United States: Lynne Culp from Los Angeles, Kevin Sandridge from Florida, Donna Bragg from Pennsylvania, and Woody Woodgate from Alaska. Paul Allison, Lee Baber, and Susan Ettenheim had a few ideas as well.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #65 - Is blogging a new way of seeing how to teach?

Paul Allison — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 22:51:01 -0500

[Listen to This Blog Text Here] Blogging in the classroom isn't an experiment anymore. It may still be new to many teachers, and we may still have plenty to learn about how to take the most advantage to this new genre, but many of us have been blogging with our students for several years now. We've grown more and more clear about why blogging in a social networking is central to our curricula, and we are more confident in the tools we can use to do this work.

One of the things we say to each other in this podcast is that this work is exciting because it has a history (and a theory) and a future. As schools begin again this fall, over a dozen teachers will be joining together to plan curriculum for two school-based social networks. Last year we started collecting together our plans on a wikispaces site, Elgg Plans. Our high school students' work can be found on an elgg, Youth Voice and on another wikispaces site, Youth Wiki. Our middle school students' blogs are on an elgg, the Personal Learning Space, that is a "walled garden."

Can you imagine blogging with your students? Want to join us? We would welcome you, especially now! Please respond to this post. Let us know of your interest, and we'll help you get started. Also, take a look at these Guidelines for Joining YouthVoices.net.

We'll show you how we use James Beane's "10 self and 10 world questions" to build curriculum with out students. (See this Trailfire for more information.) We plan to also mix in a healthy dose of Paulo Freire's "generative words" and "generative themes." (See a description of "generative themes that discusses images in a book, Brave New Schools. And find "generative" in the third chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed.) There's also some business about Peter Elbow's notions of freewriting and focused sentences, and so much more!

At the end of this podcast, Lee Baber shows how blogging has changed her way of teaching:

"I'm looking forward to this year. I feel like I understand now that in teaching my technology class, I need to start with this blog, and in joining with the other teachers in this space first, and fit my curriculum in around it. Because this is probably the most important skill that they're ever going to leave my computer technology class with, which is how to work the same kind of thing that we do in our community. So I'm really excited about re-working my whole year, and laying this thing out to be more participatory and to be more on time with the lessons with everybody else.... This is going to be a new way of seeing how to teach this curriculum. Again, just first teach them how to put it into practice and build community and how to write in their blog spaces and join with these other students. Second, all these other standards will fit in to that. That is why we teach them. It's life skills. It makes perfect sense. It's just just not the way anyone teaches it now."

Why would we make these kinds of changes, and invite you to do the same? In this podcast, Gail Desler answers:

"It's nice that [this blogging] project has a history. It has a past. It has a future, and it just keeps building. And it really is about engaging kids, and using tools that have something to do with how they actually learn today."

Please listen to this podcast, and consider joining us. Give your students a voice this year! Please express your interest or ask questions in the comments attached to this post.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #54 - 05.23.07 How do we keep it real in school blogs?

Paul Allison — Thu, 24 May 2007 20:31:15 -0500

We invite you to listen in as eight Writing Project and WorldBridges teachers from five different (U.S.) states reflect on our students work in Youth Voices.

Alice Barr, Yarmouth HS, Yarmouth, Maine
Barbara Mehlman, Humanities and the Arts High School HUM, NY. New York
Bill Oneal, Trenton Central High School, West, Trenton, New Jersey
Ken Stein, Satellite High School, Midtown, NY, New York
Lee Baber, F. Hillyard Middle School, Broadway, Virginia
Matt Makowetski, MHS, Lompoc, California
Paul Allison, East Side Community HS, NY, New York
Susan Ettenheim, Eleanor Roosevelt HS, NY, New York

After welcoming our newest members of the community, we spent some time celebrating what is going well in this school-based community of about 1000 student writers/bloggers. We discussed ways we might collaborate more over the summer and into next fall. And we began to make plans for next year. We are a community of teachers, focused on fostering a social network where students can become compelling bloggers. Some of our questions include:

How can we cover all of the required skills and topics of our various curricula (technology, global studies, art, English...) and still allow students to blog about topics of their own choosing?
Could we select a group of books and invite students to form communities (reading groups) around each of these? How could we have a common text or common texts available as an option for students to blog about... without loosing our environment of student choice?
How do we continue to nurture our ethic of student peer response. Do the sentence starters we've been using work? Can they be more open?
Can we use the elgg to share multimedia work, art, or visual work more? How do we sponsor peer response to this work? Can we all learn to use the wiki more, following Susan Ettenheim's lead on Gallery pages like Flash Creations Page 2? Will an update to the new elgg profile pages (see Paul Allison's example) be part of the solution?
How do we remain a community of teachers that is open to new teachers jumping in with their students, yet maintain a transparent support structure where we can share tips and community standards (e.g. "only Creative Commons images, please, and no pictures of the students themselves... and... and...)?
What role might our wiki play: http://elggplans.wikispaces.com? How might we organize this site better? How do we get everybody to contribute to and use this site?
Could we use our new Gcast to stay in touch on a regular basis? (Email Susan Ettenheim -- SEttenh@schools.nyc.gov -- to learn more.)
What can we do this summer to build this community? (Step one. All of us should register at the elgg: EducationBridges.net - We'll form a community or communities there.)

Come hear us talk about these and other questions. Hear what teachers talk about when they talk about their students blogging in an elgg. Join the conversation! Leave a comment if you would like to join Youth Voices, and start blogging in your classroom.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #53 - Can we use mapping to build our school social networks?

Paul Allison — Sat, 19 May 2007 11:18:08 -0500

Follow along in this week's Google Notebook

We are coming to the end of an academic year in which many of us involved with Teachers Teaching Teachers -- with the support of Dave Cormier and Jeff Lebow at WorldBridges.com --have begun two elggs (social networking sites): PersonalLearningSpace.com and YouthVoices.net. PersonalLearningSpace has about 1000 middle school students blogging, and Youth Voices has the same number blogging on the high school level. Paul Allison, Lee Baber, Chris Sloan, Susan Ettenheim and others have been following Mike Pegg's Google Maps Mania for for some time, and last summer we planned a project with Jared Cosulich's CommunityWalk that we call Entry Points. We gave our map this title because each of the about 200 markers on our map go (or should go) to a profile in the social networks mentioned above. All fine, but... We're not happy with how this project has turned out, and in this podcast we review our work with this mapping service... and with maps in general. What is our purpose and what tools would fit best for what we are trying to do? We are activist teachers willing to take risks and bring the best tools available to our students. We plan to continue discussing our use of maps -- retrospectively and prospectively. Do you use Google Maps? Let us know what you are doing. Perhaps you will put us on the right trail for bringing mapping into our social networks in ways that capture our students interest in maps and build our online communities.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #52 - How do I work blogging into my daily curriculum?

Paul Allison — Thu, 10 May 2007 22:35:42 -0500

Bud Hunt asks the question like this: “How do I work Youth Voices [a school-based social network of 1000 student bloggers] into my daily curriculum? How do I use it either to replace existing writing or to support the writing instruction that I want to do?”

Like many of us, Bud is convinced that he has the tools he needs (Elgg is just one example.) to bring blogging and social networking into into the center of his writing, reading and research curricula. Teachers like Bud have learned that students who are asked to blog weekly (or thereabouts) about issues and topics of their own choosing achieve and go beyond the goals we have for them when we teach writing in more traditional ways. (If you’re not yet one of the “convinced,” please take a look at our students work on Youth Voices.Perhaps you’ll find evidence that supports our convictions. Also checkout what the students themselves say when they write in our “How am I doing?” community blog.)

The problem is, how do we make it work? Although each teacher has a unique situation, many of us face constraints that are similar to the ones Bud points to when he asks, “How do I fit Elgg into my language arts curriculum? More specifically, how do I do so in neat, nine-week chunks? (My courses are all on the quarter system.)”

Bud sums up with these kind words: “I love, love, love what y’all are doing with YouthVoices. I want my students to be involved in a strong writing community — I just don’t know how to practically do so. ”

Many teachers find themselves, like Bud, on the brink of using student-centered (because the topics come from each individual student) blogging. And perhaps it’s not too bold for those of us who have been involved in creating Youth Voices–a community of practice for high school bloggers–to say that we can show that this kind of blogging both engages students and helps them to reach toward higher and higher standards of writing and multimedia communication. We are ready to encourage those of you on the edge to find ways to solve your very real logistical problems. It’s worth it.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #29

SusanEttenheim — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 12:55:50 -0600

Teachers Teaching Teachers #29
November 15, 2006
Download mp3

Paul Allison calls in from the airport in Atlanta on the way to Nashville for the annual meeting of The National Writing Project and Susan Ettenheim, Teb Locke, Madeline Brownstone and Lee Baber host a conversation about this week's challenges with students and online communication and collaboration. Sharon Peters shares her first adventures as her students join in the online conversation. Teb shares a very exciting discovery about introducing the mapping projects into the wiki. Here is an example of wiki with an embedded media player: http://theneighborhoodschool.org/wiki/index.php?title=Madison%2C_CT