Monika Hardy

On this episode of TTT, we finish Digital Learning Day http://www.digitallearningday.org/ with a conversation about open badges.

Paul Allison takes some time to reflect on a the use of badges in his high school English class, and look who joins him:

+Anthony Flores http://youthvoices.net/users/anthonyf- One of the first students to earn 15 badges and earn a credit in English: http://youthvoices.net/play

+Emily Goligoski, Open Badges Design & Community Lead at the Mozilla foundation who can help us think about Mozilla's Open Badge Infrastructure and Badge Backpacks. http://openbadges.org/en-US/

+Paul Oh, Senior Program Associate at National Writing Project, involved in many technology projects.

+Christina Cantrill who works with the National Writing Project and directs the Digital Is project http://digitalis.nwp.org

+Karen Fasimpaur who currently runs a small educational technology company that works with mobile technology integration in schools.http://www.k12handhelds.com/ She also runs the K12 Open Ed web sitehttp://www.k12opened.com/blog/and more!

+monika hardy, and +Paul Allison are on this episode as hosts, although Paul asked Karen if she would facilitate this episode of TTT because he wanted to talk about his experiments with badges, using P2PU, Open Badge Backpacks, and Youth Voices.

Enjoy listening to us trying figure out what we've been up to!

This episode of TTT is a conversation about the future of the teaching and schooling in general.The idea for this week's episode of TTT came about when +Andrew McGuire, a student of +Chris Sloan's who had graduated from high school last year, told Chris that he wants to be an English teacher. But he wants a different kind of education than a lot of what he has received. Chris writes:

He’s an education reformer at heart, and a lot of what he described as his ideal educational environment aligns with some of the people who’ve joined us on Teachers Teaching Teachers recently. He’s talking about connected learning in third spaces that involve a maker approach and is inquiry-based. So what would you tell an 18-year old who’s thinking about becoming an English teacher? Not only what Andrew and others like him should study, but how they should go about their teacher education?

Along with Andrew we are joined by these educators: Meenoo Rami, Bryan Loftis, Troy Hicks, Scott Shelhart, Chris Lehmann.

Enjoy!

On this episode of TTT Monika Hardy and her student, Cristian Leobardo lead us in a be lab update. We take a look at their revised Website, their book, and their travels http://redefineschool.com.

Here's how Monika, her students and her colleagues describe their main foucus/premise:

Public education could be the most accelerating venue for social change. Rather than waiting for any of the incredible [past, current and ongoing] innovations in redefining public education to scale, imagine we scale the individual. Imagine a new (old) narrative that can start anywhere because it begs no prep or training. Imagine we trust simplicity enough to give it a go. Imagine hastening equity, and ongoing sustainability.
I’ve been working with youth the last four years, locally in Loveland Colorado, as well as virtually around the globe. We have been in an intense mode of experimenting with first, self-directed learning, and now, the intersection of city and school. We've been afforded an incubated space (sand box) within our city, as a connected adjacency (both in and out of) our school district.

We are joined on this episode of TTT by

Paul Allison, Scott and Kelsey Shelhart, Cristian Leobardo, Karen Fasimpaur, Gregory Hill, Monika Hardy, Mikhil Goyal

Enjoy!

Find out more about Gooru http://goorulearning.org on this episode of TTT. This is the first in a series of webcasts in which we'll focus on Gooru, asking: How do you teach with Gooru? We'll be talking with teachers who use Gooru in their classrooms, asking them to share best practices and exchange ideas. And we'll dialogue with the Gooru team around what might be done to improve Gooru for all of us?

If you're new to Gooru, here are three places to start your inquiries:

• You might take a look through the lens of Open Educational Resources (OER): Project Blue Sky: Big Boost to OER From . . . Pearson?

Gooru Learning itself has a pedigree that is worth considering. Gooru is developed by Ednovo, the nonprofit education startup founded by Prasad Ram. Ram has a rich history in Silicon Valley, including work at Xerox PARC, Yahoo! and Google. While Director of Engineering for Google Research, Ram developed the concept for using search technology to discover educational content. Ram decided to leave Google in January 2011 and pursue this concept. Ram has started an education focused non-profit startup called Ednovo, which is going to build upon Gooru, a free web based education solution that was begun as a ’20% effort’ at Google, and piloted in India with 25 classrooms and 1000 students. Gooru allows teachers to use openly licensed web resources, find lesson plans on all subjects and topics and then customize it to their specific needs, with rich multimedia content including videos, slides, and simulations.

• You could take a dive into Kevin Hodgson's Meandering Mind and read his review, Gooru: Another Research Project Resource.

So, this morning, I went to Gooru to poke around a bit and remember what it is about. When I had been there last, the site had recently launched and I wasn’t quite sure what they were up to. There didn’t seem to be a lot of content. Now I understand. The site is another way to help students streamline their research queries (sort of like Instagrok, which I use) and for teachers to build up “collections” of resources that can be shared. I like the overall feel of the site — it takes a few minutes to get a sense of what to do, but once you understand it, you will see there are powerful paths to follow.

• You might also go to Gooru themselves and find out that they want to help us "Spend More Time Learning--and Less Time Searching."

Every day teachers and students scour the web to find the best resources to help them learn or teach, pulling from different resources scattered all over the Internet--but what if you could find and organize all the best web resources in one place? With Gooru, you can. Watch NASA videos about solar flares, play interactive games on PBS.com that teach about friction, and take quizzes on equations from Khan Academy. We aggregate the best of the web, giving you high-quality and free multimedia resources within seconds, so you can spend more time studying, and less time searching. When you find resources you love, you can then organize them into a playlist called a collection.

You might also find out what you need to know to get started by listening to our inspiring guests for this episode of TTT:

Paul Allison, Monika Hardy, and Chris Sloanhost Xenia Shih, Timothy Burke, and Jody Donovan from Gooru along with two amazing California teachers, Leah Jensen and Gail Desler.

Enjoy!

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Click Read more to see the chat that was happening during this live webcast and some important links to resources.

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On this episode of TTT, re-mix and get ready for EduCon 2.5 http://educonphilly.org with George Mayo, Harry Costner, and Bill Fitzgerald along with our friends Scott Shelhart and Kelsey Shelhart.

A few weeks ago, George wrote in an email:

Another teacher and I have this experiment for this year's Educon called @remixeducon http://educonphilly.org/conversations/remixeducon . We're planning on creating a structure for participants to share, download and remix media created throughout the conference. The other teacher's name is Harry Costner. He's a really cool middle school film teacher in Virginia.

Would it be possible for us to pitch our @remixeducon idea on a TTT show sometime after the new year as we get closer to Educon? I'm trying to think of ways to spread the word about our project before the conference.

How do you turn down an offer like that?

In addition, Harry and George are doing a second session at Educon on Video Production and Social Media http://educonphilly.org/conversations/Video_Production_and_Social_Media:A_Powerful_Combination

That's not all!

When we heard that Bill Fitzgerald would be remixing at Educon too, we asked him what he’s up too. Here was his reply:

We are definitely running a pre-Educon event - the details (and some of our thoughts about what we hope to achieve, big picture) are linked in this post: http://funnymonkey.com/when-we-talk-about-open-content-this-is-what-we-talk-about

Our Educon session on this is at http://educonphilly.org/conversations/Adopting-Using-and_Reusing_Open_Content

We are also doing a second session on starting a non-profit: http://educonphilly.org/conversations/So_You_Want_To_Start_an_Educational_Non-Profit

Sounds like fun doesn’t it? Enjoy!