Adam Mackie

Teachers Teaching Teachers #277 Hacking Classrooms and Congress with Chad Sansing, Brian Ingram, Pam Moran, Adam Mackie 12.21.11

After hearing about a teacher from Ft. Worth, Texas, Brian Ingram at the end of a couple of recent “Best of the Left” episodes http://www.bestoftheleftpodcast.com we decided to invite him to join us on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?feed=rss2 . Brian is a teacher who recently made a decision to Walk Out and to Walk On into an electoral campaign. The Occupy movement has inspired him to consider a run for Congress. Talk about Inspiring!

Brian joins the teachers listed here in an ongoing a conversation about Margaret WheatlTeachers277ey and Deborah Frieze’s book, Walk Out Walk On http://walkoutwalkon.net :






Pam Moran, and


Like on earlier episodes in December, we talk about our work in classrooms, schools and beyond through some of the the lenses provided in Walk Out Walk On. (See http://edtechtalk.com/node/5057 and http://edtechtalk.com/node/5053 )

We also look to learn from the Occupy movements. Recently we have been having discussions around the book http://walkoutwalkon.net which was published earlier this year by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze of The Berkana Institute. We’ve been noticing the convergence between the school change movements that many of us connected to Teachers Teaching Teachers are involved with and this book. We have also taken note of the convergence between the Occupation movements and Walk Out Walk On.

As it says in the book:

Walk Outs are people who bravely choose to leave behind a world of unsolvable problems, scarce resources, limiting beliefs and destructive individualism. They walk on to the ideas, beliefs and practices that enable them to give birth to new systems that serve community. This is the story of an emerging movement of pioneering leaders and communities around the world who are self-organizing to create healthy and resilient communities.

On Teachers Teaching Teachers, we have been talking to teachers involved with their local Occupy Wall Street movements, and we are looking for what we can learn from both that movement andWalk Out Walk On to further our commitments and understanding of change in education.

Enjoy! And join us in upcoming shows when we plan to continue this conversation.

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Teachers Teaching Teachers #263 Listening Without Agenda Puts Us in Serious Danger of a 3-Letter Word that Starts w/ "F" 9.7.11

Pericles Group

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, Monika Hardy, Chris Sloan and Paul Allison invited Amy Lewark, Mary Ann Reilly, Adam Mackie, and Jodhbir Singh, who has been visiting visiting the Lab that Monika Hardy facilitates. He has a passion to help change education in India where he is from. Monika writes, "We've been corresponding for some time now. This is our first face to face. He's incredible and will have some good insight of what we're doing and how it looks in person."

Mainly, we learned from a group of educators who teach the classics using gaming. We hope you'll enjoy learning more from the Pericles Group.

From their web site:

Kevin Ballestrini teaches Latin and Mythology at the Norwich Free Academy in Connecticut. He has received an M.A. and B.A. in Classics from the University of Colorado and University of Connecticut respectively. In addition to experience teaching in a traditional classroom setting, in the 2010-2011 academic year Kevin deployed the first fully practomimetic introductory language course at the high school level in a section of Latin I. The experience has clearly enhanced student engagement and connection to life and culture in ancient Rome. For 2011-12, he will be expanding the offering of practomimetic courses to the second year of introductory Latin in addition to the first. As an avid technology enthusiast, he maintains his blog, Techna Virumque Cano (http://kevinbal.blogspot.com) where he discusses the intersection of technology and his teaching. He is also a regular contributor to the collaborative blog Play the Past (http://playthepast.org). Kevin is the leader of a large kinship in The Lord of the Rings Online and active in many gaming communities.

Roger Travis is an Associate Professor of Classics in the Department of Literatures, Cultures & Languages of the University of Connecticut. He is also the Director of the Video Games and Human Values Initiative (http://vghvi.org) at UConn, an interdisciplinary online nexus for online courses and scholarly activities like fellowships, symposia, and the initiative’s Proceedings, of which he is the editor. He received his Bachelor’s degree in classics from Harvard College, and his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley before arriving at UConn in 1997. He has published on Homeric epic, Greek tragedy, Greek historiography, the 19th C. British novel, HALO, and the massively-multiplayer online role-playing game He has been President of the Classical Association of New England and of the Classical Association of Connecticut. He writes the blog Living Epic (http://livingepic.org) about his discovery of the fundamental connection between ancient epic and the narrative video game, and is a founder and contributor of the collaborative blog Play the Past(http://playthepast.org). In the 2009-2010 academic year, Roger offered the first courses ever designed entirely as practomimes (seehttp://www.academicimpressions.com/news.php?i=59 for detail).

Stephen Slota is a Ph.D. student in Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut and holds a full-time assistantship with the UConn Two Summers Program under his advisor, Dr. Michael Young. Stephen received both his Bachelor of Science in Molecular & Cellular Biology and Masters in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Connecticut, followed by two years teaching life science at a Title IX Connecticut high school. He has previously served as a professional development specialist in educational technology and now works with Dr. Roger Travis of the UConn Department of Modern and Classical Languages on the effects of game-based learning in high school and college Latin courses. Stephen’s research interests include: gaming and its effects on student engagement and achievement, situated effects of gaming on secondary learners, prosocial learning through massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), the influence of imagination and dreams on situational perception, and pedagogical means of improving student self-efficacy.

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

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