Susan Ettenheim

There were many wonderful moments at ISTE this year! One of them was the closing keynote by Chris Lehmann, principal of the Science Leadership Academy (SLA) in Philadelphia. That evening we invited Chris, Bud Hunt, and four teachers from SLA -- Diana Laufenberg, Zac Chase, Matt VanKouwenberg, and  Larissa Pahomov -- to join us at Rembrandt's Restaurant (aka SLA North) to reflect on ISTE and whatever else they wanted to talk about.

Enjoy the SLA students and Chris Lehmann's speech in this video, check out his reflections, and listen to our conversation. Enjoy!

Chris Lehmann's ISTE Keynote - Process and Impressions: I gave the closing keynote at ISTE on Wednesday, and it was a really wonderful experience. It's an amazing thing to get up in front of 5,000 plus people and talk about what you deeply believe. It was particularly hard for two reasons - one, the ISTE community is as close to a "home-base" outside of SLA that I have in the world of education. There are so many people - too numerous to mention here - who have been friends, co-learners, mentors, sounding boards over the past six years that to speak in front of all of them in one place was both exhilarating and a little intimidating... and many of them had heard me speak at other events, so finding something new for that segment of the audience was a real challenge. But the real reason it was so hard to craft this speech was because I was preceded by my students. (Read the rest of this post on Practical Theory - A View from the Classroom.

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

Enjoy this podcast, recorded a couple of days ago, getting ready for ISTE.

Chat during this podcast:

Enjoy this podcast, recorded 10 days ago, getting ready for ISTE. What are you looking for there? What are you bringing?

Click Read more to see Christina Cantrill's personal list of some of the events where National Writing Project (WP) teachers will be participating as well as the chat that was happening during this webcast.

What are your personal learning networks (PLN) online? What do your students do? Do we use different or similar tools to learn online? Do you use mobiles? Do students? What do students’ PLN’s look like now? What will they look like in 1, 3, and 5 years?

Samantha Adams and Meenoo Rami are two of our guests on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers.  Samatha Adams joined us for further conversations about the NMC Horizon Report: 2011 K-12 Edition, and Meenoo Rami let us know what’s happening at #engchat on Twitter on Monday evenings and beyond.

Samantha Adams
Director of Communications, NMC (www.nmc.org)
Samantha Adams came to the NMC with an extensive writing and research background in both print and digital publishing. After working with the top trade publishers in the world for a previous job digitizing content for ebooks, she fell in love with writing about emerging technologies. At the NMC, she works closely with CEO Larry Johnson to spearhead the NMC Horizon Project, which encompasses the The NMC Horizon Report series. In the recently released NMC Horizon Report: 2011 K-12 Edition, she was deeply involved in the research and writing of the report. As the lead writer at the NMC, Samantha also focuses on strategic communications within and outside of the NMC member community, promoting special events and publications, while managing the organization’s social media forums. In her free time, Samantha enjoys writing fiction and has recently published an anthology of short stories.

Meenoo Rami and a couple of her colleagues who helped make #engchat the place to be on Twitter on Mondays at 7:00 PM Eastern / 4:00 PM Pacific.

Click Read more to see a recent sampling of #engchat
and a copy of the chat that was happening during this webcast.

Do you garden with your students? Do they make things? And do they read and write about these experiences, and sometimes publish the results online?

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, you'll hear National Writing Project teachers from Colorado, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, and California describe the gardens and writing projects they are doing with their students.

One of the guests, Patricia Paugh, recently did a session at the National Writing Project’s Urban Sites Network meeting in Boston.

Adventures in Text Analysis: Reading and Writing a Community Garden Project
Mary Moran and Patricia Paugh,
This session investigates theories related to genre pedagogy enacted in a year-long project on community gardening in an urban neighborhood. The session will include analysis of multi-genre texts and sharing of artifacts related to purposeful writing by students who worked with an urban farming collaborative. (Patricia C. Paugh, is an Associate Professor Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Massachusetts Boston.)

We were also joined by an elementary school teacher, Denise Ferrell, who told us about the multiple garden projects she has been doing with Annie Ortiz and other colleagues at the Skyline Elementary in Stillwater, Oklahoma:

We are fortunate at Skyline to have several kinds of gardens. We have a butterfly garden, an 83 ft raised bed, 5 small square raised beds, a cistern, some small dwarf fruit trees. We also have an outdoor classroom.

Fred Mindlin, Associate Director for Technology Integration at the Central California Writing Project, joined us from a Whole Foods store! Fred has been working with gardeners and digital stories and videos, and more as part of the National Writing Project’s Makes project.

Marshall Woody from the Southern Colorado Writing Project who has just starting gardening with his students, was on the call with us as well.

Enjoy!

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