21st Century Learning #132

May 25, 2010

Social Media, Construction and 5th and 6th Grade Tech

arvind discusses Hewitt School's venture into Facebook and Twitter.  Vinnie discusses the construction project that his school is diving into.  Alex discusses teaching 5th and 6th grade Tech Classes in the fall.  We wrapped with some conversation about Google and its recent upgrades.   

* Photo Credit: Pshab

<Chat Transcript>

For this podcast, we invited five New York City educators who, at the time, were in the middle of a 3-week Summer Institute with the New York City Writing Project. Paul Allison and Shantanu Saha were the facilitators for this Institute in which participants were invited to:

Spend 12 days this summer with other New York City Writing Project teachers who use technology in their classrooms. Share the ways we use the Internet to make student-to-student connections. Learn about a curriculum currently being developed and collaborated on by teachers across the nation. Explore how we use blogs, wikis, images, videos, podcasts, and other tools to inspire young people to do research into their own questions.

These are five of the teachers who joined us:

• Charlie Freij, Technology/English Teacher, East Brooklyn Community High School
• Doug Condon, Art Teacher, Academy of American Studies in Queens
• Julio Benitez, English Teacher, High School for Construction Trades, Engineering, and Architecture, Queens
• Karen Levy, Library Media Specialist, Christopher Columbus High School, Bronx
• Michael Dodes, Library Media Specialist, samuel Gompers Career/Technonogy Ed High School, Bronx

We also had a wonderful surprise guest, Suzie Boss. Just before going live with this webcast (that is recorded here as a podcast), Paul noticed that Suzie Boss was online in Skype. Since we had been talking about her book earlier in the day, Paul took a chance and invited Suzie to join them. What an thoughful, supportive, informed guest she was!

And that's not all. We were also joined by Mike from Central Texas. He's been teaching for 40 years, using inquiry, Great Books Discussions, and the New Jersey Writing Project (in Texas) as his touchstones, and recently he has been exploring Web 2.0 tools. This was his first skype call.

How wonderful it was to add these names to our list of guests:

• Suzie Boss, co-author (with Jane Krauss) of Reinventing Project-Based Learning: Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age
• Mike, a 40-year veteran history teacher from Central Texas

Please enjoy the podcast. Find out what happens in a tech-focused Advanced/Open Summer Institute in the New York City Writing Project.

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