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Gail Desler

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

Wed, 2012-02-01 02:59 — Paul Allison

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 #269 Asking Frank Questions with Fred Mindlin, Cynthia Shidner, Valerie Burton, Gail Desler -10.26.11

Sat, 2011-10-29 01:00 — Paul Allison

60:57 minutes (13.95 MB)
TTT%252520269

We asked important questions about reading, censorship, teaching with prescribed curriculums, freedom, and more on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers .

Chris Sloan

Gail Desler

Fred Mindlin

Monika Hardy
(with
 Linda,
Barry Floyd,
and Christian)

Cynthia Shidner

Paul Allison

Valerie Burton

Enjoy!

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Teachers Teaching Teachers #266 What changes when we allow connections and brilliance in one-room schoolhouses online? 10.5.11

Sat, 2011-10-08 13:54 — Paul Allison

66:32 minutes (15.23 MB)

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, seven of us--Chris Sloan, Gail Desler, Fred Mindlin, Monika Hardy, Valerie Burton, Scott Shelhardt and Paul Allison--share our ideas, concerns, hopes, dreams, plans and strategies for moving our teaching away from prescribed learning toward a social change that puts students and their passions at the center of work together.

We find ourselves pondering larger pedagogical questions, discussing issues involved in working together, and brainstorming on nitty-gritty issues about how we might take advantage of the resources we have. Many of these questions will inform our conversations in future shows:

  • How do we use the connections young people already have--through tools like cell phones and social networks--to extend their learning?
  • How do we get to the brilliance within each young person by moving beyond external incentives like grades and badges?
  • What's the difference between teaching with/through games and "gamifying" the curriculum?
  • How can we build online cultures using sites like Youth Voices where young children, middle school students, older adolescents, and even young adults can work together in an online one-room school house?
  • How can we find the hardware and software we need to enable our students to work together?

And finally, we'd love to know what guests you would like us to invite and what topics you would like us to discuss on future shows of Teachers Teaching Teachers as Monika Hardy, Paul Allison and Chris Sloan have evolved into regular hosts on the show. 

 


Teachers Teaching Teachers #259 Getting Ready with Youth Voices 8.10.11

Thu, 2011-08-11 18:06 — Paul Allison

70:12 minutes (16.07 MB)

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers we are joined by Kevin Hodgson, Charles Freij, Margaret Simon, Judy Jester, Ronnie Burt, Gail Desler, Chris Sloan, Adam Cohen, Dan Polleys. We talk about our plans for the fall and how using Youth Voices might fit with our work with our students.

(Sorry about the over-modulation on some of these voices. We'll improve sound quality in the future.)
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Teachers Teaching Teachers #245 - Meet the New Youth Voices - An open meeting where we talk about the recent upgrade - 4.27.11

Sun, 2011-05-22 18:55 — Paul Allison

62:50 minutes (14.38 MB)

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, a group of us who are in the process of launching a new version of Youth Voices met to continue the process of building the technology and the pedegogy of our work together.

Youth Voices is a school-based social network that was started in 2003 by a group of National Writing Project teachers. We merged several earlier blogging projects, preferring to bring our students together in one site that would live beyond any particular class, where it would be easier for individual students to connect with other students, comment on each others work, and create multimedia posts for each other. Further we thought it made sense for us to pool our knowledge about curriculum and digital literacies. If being part of such a community makes sense to you, we invite you to join us too. We work to embrace any teacher who is interested to have their students publish online and participate in the give and take of a social network like Youth Voices.

Youth Voices is much more than a website or a social network. It is also a welcoming community of teachers who have been planning curriculum together for many years. In addition to being active members in our local Writing Projects and the National Writing Project, many of us also count ourselves as member of the World Bridges community, and we meet regularly via Skype on a weekly webcast/podcast, Teachers Teaching Teachers, which has been going live every Wednesday evening at EdTechTalk since 2006.

All of this collaboration and talk, these years of building curriculum and working on the web together have led to to consider: What do the Youth Voices/Teachers Teaching Teachers teachers love about this work? And why do we think any kindergarten - college teacher might also find to love there too? What we think you and your students will find on Youth Voices, what we keeps us coming back, what we strive to engender, what we will never give up on (even in a school) is involving our students in “authentic conversation.”

Over the years the teachers who have been working together to grow Youth Voices have learned that as important questions_bgas it is to have students publish multi-media, well-crafted products, it is at least as important to nurture, guide, and allow time for students to write comments and to develop conversations about each others discussion posts. Our mission at Youth Voices is to be a place online where students from across the nation (and globally, when possible) can engage other young people in conversations about real topics that they see happening in the world. We want our students to be immersed in lively, voiced give-and-take with their peers.

(For more, please read this resource at the National Writing Project's Digital Is site, "Authentic Conversations on Youth Voices.")
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Teachers Teaching Teachers #233 - Bud Hunt and Gail Desler on citing sources, loving Audacity and more - 1.26.11

Fri, 2011-02-25 18:08 — Paul Allison

48:20 minutes (11.06 MB)

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, and Chris Sloan catch up with two other National Writing Project teachers, Bud Hunt and Gail Desler.

First we talk to Bud about his conversation at this year EduCon 2.3.  We encourage you to follow the links at the bottom of this description from the EduCon site (I hope we did our "linktrubition" correctly here!):

Dr. Remix; or how I learned to stop worrying and love citation
Browse recordings: livestream.com/educon8
Who: Bud Hunt, St. Vrain Valley School District (CO) and Joe Bires, Haddonfield School District (NJ)
Conversation Description:
     This presentation is an extension of a Twitter conversation in response to a keynote presentation at ISTE 2010. One presenter felt that he was witnessing an act of plagiarism, while the other felt he was seeing remix in action. Their constructive disagreement is worth further exploration.
Clearly, there are many differing views on the role of proper use of the work of others. What is the place of citation in the work we are doing with students and others? When should you cite? How? What does a digital citation, or "linktribution" as Alan Levine calls it, look like online?
     Perhaps you never thought about it or perhaps you never considered the issue in its totality. This discussion will raise your awareness of this issue that fundamentally affects us because ideas are at the core of all of our curricula. Through citation, we ask students to connect ideas together and create new ones, but the issue of citation masks the fundamental question of the relationship between ideas and their creators.
Websites:  http://www.budtheteacher.com - http://edtechleadership.com - http://bit.ly/drremix

Next up in the podcast, Gail Desler brings us up to date on here work as a technology integrator in the Elk Grove (CA) Unified School District.  Among other things, Gail describes why she loves Audacity so much, and here's some of how she puts it in her wonderful Edublog, BlogWalker:

     The appeal of  Audacity to students is that they can edit all or just parts of a recording. For the past few months, I’ve had the privilege of observing Teresa Cheung’s 4th graders delve into Audacity to edit their Stories from Heart audio interviews. Once students see how easy it is to zoom in and delete an “er” or “um,” or shorten a pause, or amplify a section that’s too low, or remove background noise, etc., they become active sound editors. I love watching the confidence level of ELLs grow, as they relax, knowing how easy it is to redo words or even a single word until they’re satisfied with the output.
     But more importantly, as Teresa’s students listen, for instance, to Chase’s mother explain how she came to be born by a waterfall, or Devina’s grandmother talk about growing up in Berkeley in the ’50s, or Anthony’s mother talk about her childhood days escaping Laos,  the students take pride in sharing and preserving family stories, cultures, and languages. As the collection builds, so does the celebration of common threads and diversity in Ms. Cheung’s classroom, along with an appreciation for the power of the human voice.

Finally, Paul, Chris, and Susan mull over some of the changes they are planning for Youth Voices. Within days of this post, Bill Fitzgerald and the other "primates" over at FunnyMonkey will have finished a re-launch of Youth Voices on their new Voice Box installation.

The VoiceBox installation profile is designed to simplify the work of groups looking to create or expand their online presence. Groups who could use this site range from media organizations to not-for-profits to schools to advocacy groups. If an organization wants to build a place for their stakeholders to publish, interact, and get more informed, then VoiceBox could support that work.

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Teachers Teaching Teachers #220 - Connections: Wooly School Garden, Bird Watching, Photography, and Voices on the Gulf - 9.29.10

Mon, 2010-11-08 11:25 — Paul Allison

67:40 minutes (15.49 MB)

Enjoy our curriculum share from late-September on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers. Chris Sloan, Margaret Simon, Susan Ettenheim, Paul Allison, and Gail Desler welcomed our guest Becky Jezek, the Director of the Wooly School Garden project.

Woolly School Garden from Drew Falkman on Vimeo.

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Teachers Teaching Teachers #221 - Calling for creative students to bring their passions into the classrom - 10.06.10

Mon, 2010-10-11 22:10 — Paul Allison

68:15 minutes (15.62 MB)

Exciting conversations are budding on Youth Voices and on Voices on the Gulf. 

Martha, a senior at the East-West School of International Studies in Queens (Paul Allison's school) begins this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers by putting out a call for other students to join us on TTT. She wants to talk about how students express themselves creatively outside of school. We hope more students will be able to join us on the next TTT, Wednesday, October 13, 9:00 pm Eastern / 6:00 Pacific.

Margaret Simon, whose elementary school students have been shining on Voices on the Gulf joins us on this podcast as well. Margaret has invited a few of her students to join us on TTT this coming Wednesday as well.

Gail Desler, Chris Sloan, David Pulling have updates to share with us as well. We talk about research, I-Search and more!

Enjoy this podcast. Join us on Wednesday, and invite a student to join us as well.

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Teachers Teaching Teachers #216 "Maybe we dodged a bullet here, but there are nagging issues." More on the BP Oil Spill 9.01.10

Tue, 2010-09-28 01:54 — Paul Allison

66:31 minutes (15.22 MB) The conversations around Voices on the Gulf continue on this episToWa-step-by-stepode of Teachers Teaching Teachers.  Joining on this show with Gail Desler,  who works with teachers in the Sacramento flyway in California, and three guests from Louisiana: Margaret Simon, David Pulling and one of his students at Louisiana State ToWa-step-by-step University at Eunice, Erin Jackson.

Learn more about teaching and learning about the environment, including references to bird artists John Muir Laws and Olivia Bouler.


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21:03:36 Gail Desler: Hi Peggy
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