Ben Papell

Teachers Teaching Teachers #95 - Locating the Tyranny of Filtering - 03.12.08

Paul Allison — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 21:15:36 -0500

It's happening in small, geographically dispersed schools in rural Alaska. Three people are responsible for doing it for over a million public school students in New York City. An independent school in Milwaukee uses the same software that is being used in NYC to do it. In Colorado, an outspoken opponent of it was recently hired for a district level job, and now he is on a small committee that gives the thumbs up or down. In North Dakota, a secret password is emailed each week to a group of thirty teachers who can then undo it in their schools, when needed. In rural Virginia, a teacher carefully measures her arguments for the educational benefit against the possible risks each time she requests for it to be undone. Because so many schools do it in so many different ways, the developers of VoiceThread have to work overtime to keep their Web 2.0 tool available in public schools.

In September, Wesley Fryer "observed from China that the level of content filtering / censorship enforced by the central, totalitarian government was actually LESS severe than the content filtering enforced in many U.S. public schools" (Content filtering in Communist China versus an Oklahoma school » Moving at the Speed of Creativity).

Really? Do the descriptions in the first paragraph accurately represent the tyranny of filtering in U.S. schools today? Or do teachers have more power than we often exercise? It's become too easy for educators to represent filtering as if it's something that oppresses us. What if we find that the enemy is us?

From the discussion captured on this podcast, we can sketch a much more complicated picture of how filtering really seems to work in U.S. schools. See what we mean by clicking Read more, below.

Chat Log

Teachers Teaching Teachers #91: Tagging, Tumbling, and Mathcasting 02.13.08

Paul Allison — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 23:56:00 -0600

This is a jam-packed thirty-nine minutes, where we explore the power of tagging, teachers using tumblogs, mathcasts, VoiceThreads in health, speech, history, math, music, technology, and EFL classes. Join Paul Allison, Lee Baber, Susan Ettenheim, and VoiceThread's Ben Papell (Yes, he's a "regular" by now), as they welcome these fresh voices, fresh at least to us at Teachers Teaching Teachers:

Carla Raguseo, an EFL teacher and Computer Lab coordinator at A.R.I.C.A.N.A., a Binational Center in Rosario, Argentina

Carla Arena, a Brazilian EFL teacher, teacher trainer and site content manager at A Binational Center in Brasilia, but she's on a leave right now.

Jeremy Brown, a Special Education Teacher at the Medow Hall Elementary School in Montgomery County, Maryland

Judi Epcke, a teacher and Technology Integration Specialist in Northbrook, Illinois

Tim Fahlberg, founder of Mathcasts, after 11 years as a math teacher.

read more

Teachers Teaching Teachers #90: Microblogging our way toward global awareness 02.06.08

Paul Allison — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 13:07:42 -0600

Some educators, including some of us who meet regularly on Teachers Teaching Teachers, have begun to find places in our curriculum for microblogging.

“Compared to regular blogging, microblogging fulfills a need for an even faster mode of communication. By encouraging shorter posts, it lowers users’ requirement of time and thought investment for content generation. This is also one of its main differentiating factors from blogging in general. The second important difference is the frequency of update. On average, a prolific blogger may update her blog once every few days; on the other hand a microblogger may post several updates in a single day.” (Java Akshay, Tim Finin, Xaiodan Song, Bell Tseng, Why We Twitter: U nderstanding Microblogging Usage and Communitites. August 12, 2007)

At the beginning of this podcast we explore microblogging with David Karp, the 21-year-old fou nder of Tumblr, an interesting new blogging platform that some of us have begun to use. VoiceThread founders, Ben Pappel and Steve Muth join us in this conversation as well. (Read more about microblogging below.)

In the last 15 or 20 minutes, (beginning at 31:14) we are joined by George Mayo, an 8th grade teacher in Maryland, and Wendy Dexler, a 3rd grade teacher in Florida, who joined each other at Educon 2.0 to create a Global Darfur Awareness Event which will take place on March 6th. (Read more about this project below.)

Chat Log

Teachers Teaching Teachers #89: Is the tool irrelevant? 01.30.08

Paul Allison — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 17:43:37 -0600

Listen to Scott Floyd, Tech Liaison for the Texas Bluebonnet Writing Project, and Ellen Petry Leanse explain how and why they collaborated on a project that resulted in this VoiceThread, as well as other media versions of the same story. Scott writes on his blog:

Ellen Petry Leanse has a powerful story to tell of her escape from the political unrest in Kenya during the presidential elections over the 2007 Christmas holidays. She and her 12 year old son were there volunteering in an orphanage as well as other humanitarian work. I first encountered her story January 15th on Guy Kawasaki’s blog as a guest post. Her writing moved me. Something inside of me kept saying to contact her and help her share what she and her son went through. As Google would have it, her email came up in the first try, and by 8:11 AM I sent off a personal plea to her to share her narrative through digital storytelling.

A Piece of My Mind - my ideas, thoughts, experiences, and lessons learned in education The founders of VoiceThread, Ben Papell and Steve Muth, also join us in this discussion of the lessons that can be learned from this one example of digital storytelling.

Chat Log

Teachers Teaching Teachers #77 - Participation is the Most Important Part

Paul Allison — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 05:54:26 -0500

We were joined this week by Joyce Valenza and the co-founders of of Voice Thread, Ben Papell and Steve Muth (and many wonderful teachers in the chat room). In the spirit of producing content that is open to co-creation...

...we invite you add an interesting Voice Thread to this post. Either link to or embed a Voice Thread that would help show how teachers are using this tool in their classrooms or with their colleagues.

Click Add new comment, and show us a Voice Thread that you think is cool!

Thanks.

Chat Log

Chat Log from TTT77

Paul Allison — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 05:38:08 -0500

2007-10-31 20:48:07 [Message] SusanEttenheim -> EdTechTalk: hi lee hi peggy

2007-10-31 20:48:41 [Message] cheryloakes -> EdTechTalk: Evening!

2007-10-31 20:48:57 [Message] cheryloakes -> EdTechTalk: I wanted a front row seat.

2007-10-31 20:49:11 [Message] SusanEttenheim -> EdTechTalk: hhi cheryl

2007-10-31 20:49:12 [Message] Lee Baber -> EdTechTalk: Hello!

2007-10-31 20:49:26 [Message] Lee Baber -> EdTechTalk: Thanks for coming Cheryl! Hello Peggy