Susan Ettenheim

The day after this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, Chris Sloan, a frequent co-host and planner on the show this year, wrote to Susan and Paul: “I have to say that last night's TTT was an inspiration. It's really got me re-evaluating my teaching.”

The focus of this week’s episode was on social start-ups. Suzie Boss helped us decide who to invite to a show where we were asking to better understand social entrepreneurship. One of the projects that Suzie thought we would want to know about is Cool School Challenge, which, in her description is:

an effort to reduce the carbon footprint of schools. It was launched by Mike Town, environmental science teacher at Redmond High School in Washington, and partners with Puget Sound Clean Air Agency. Participating schools set CO2 reduction goals, figure out their own strategies to achieve them, and track results (and $$ savings for schools) on their website: www.coolschoolchallenge.org

We caught up with Mike Town while he was traveling. Mike currently lives in Washington DC on a year-long Einstein fellowship with the National Science Foundation, and will return to teaching next year. We ask Mike specific questions about Cool School Challenge, but we also ask him to help us to think about the whole idea of working with students to learn about how social justice issues and entrepreneurship can go together.

Bill Ferriter (One Tweet CAN Change the World) was another able guide in our inquiry on this episode of TTT. We talk to him about his micro-loans club of which he and his students are pretty excited:  

One of the projects that I've begun to engage my students in is studying the world through microloans that we are making through Kiva.  We've spent the better part of the past 8 months raising money, studying countries, and selecting entrepreneurs that we are willing to support with loans ranging anywhere from $25-$100.  We've even created a Lending Team---called Team Kids Care---designed to encourage other classes to join us in our efforts. (See more on his Microloans wiki page on Digitally Speaking.)

Another social entrepreneur on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers was our colleague from New Orleans, Kyle Meador, who is the Director of Educational Programs at Our School at Blair Grocery. Their "About OSBG" page on their web site summarizes some of the work that Kyle does with Nat Turner (5 Years After Katrina, Teacher Tills Soil of Lower 9th Ward) and others in the Lower Ninth Ward:

Our mission is to create a resource-rich safe space for youth empowerment and sustainable community development.
Currently, we:

• Employ 10 neighborhood teenagers in our Growing Growers program,
• Operate as the Gulf Coast Growing Power Regional Outreach Training Center,
• Operate a Community Supported Agriculture-style market (Our Market) and a restaurant sales business generating an average of $1,500 weekly from 1/3 acre of land with our students,
• Engage and educate over 700 high school and college service-learners annually, and
• Operate an independent alternative school with 5 total students
  

For listeners who want some background about social entrepreneurship, Suzie Boss provides a couple of a couple of introductory links:

The New Heroes is a PBS documentary series (now a few years old) that profiles social entrepreneurs from around the world. (Full disclosure: Suzie helped write the classroom materials). Details here: www.pbs.org/thenewheroes

Youth Venture is the sister organization Ashoka, which has been kind of the mother-ship for nurturing social entrepreneurs worldwide. Youth Venture aims to get teens (and younger students) involved in leading their own sustainable solutions, and offers start-up grants to teams that come up with good ideas: http://www.genv.net/

We hope you too will find inspiration and encouragement from these beacons of social vision and business sense that we were able to have on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers.

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

Teaching about the crises in Japan is the focus of this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers. What relevance does the earthquake/ tsunami/ nuclear power catastrophe unfolding in Japan have to our students lives and our curriculum? We suspect that there are many “teachable moments” in the stories coming to us from Japan. But what are they?  What are the lessons we might be learning alongside our students?

Many teachers contributed their thoughts and links in the chat (see below), and four guest joined us in the Skype conversation:

• To help us answer some of our questions, we invited Dave Mammen to join us. Dave is an urban planner who has worked on disaster recovery efforts in Kobe, Japan and Aceh, Indonesia. He was a Visiting Professor at the Disaster Prevention Research Institute (DPRI) at Kyoto University and has directed many joint research projects with Japanese government agencies, universities and thinktanks. His research on ten years of recovery efforts in New York after 9/11 will be published later this year in Japanese and English by Fuji Technology Press. Recently Dave answered question on a CNN blog: Lessons from 9/11 will apply to helping earthquake victims in Japan – In the Arena - CNN.com Blogs http://t.co/030uvui.
  
  
• We were also joined by Martha, a senior where Paul Allison teaches, East-West School of International Studies. Martha is not shy about her love of all things Japanese, an affection that only grew after she was able to visit Tokyo on a school trip in the summer of 2009. This was the podcast we did with Martha her Japanese teacher and another student upon their return in the summer of 2009: Teachers Teaching Teachers #161 - 07.29.09 - Summer Special: Submitting Your Own Docs Templates, Japan, and Digital Storytelling.
  
  
• Kim Cofino gave us her perspectives as well. Kim is currently the Technology and Learning Coach at Yokohama International School in Japan. On her blog, Always Learning, Kim writes, "As in all my previous schools, I enjoy working with my colleagues to design authentic and engaging international projects incorporating social networking, blogs, wikis, and podcasts, and whatever comes next!" On the podcast, Kim talked about how difficult it was to write about this crisis, but she found a way. Kim was able to develop some of her thoughts in a post well worth checking out, Two Crises, Many Connections.
  
  
• Our fourth guest, Scott Lo also has a few wonderful places where you can continue to hear his perspectives. It's often a treat to check out Scott's Radio Tokyo, especially these days. Scott's plan "is to make the live recordings of these podcasts on Friday evenings on ds106 Radio." We were delighted to learn from Scott on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers as well!

As is often true in crises like this, a great source for teachers is the Learning Network at the New York Times. On Friday, March 18, 2011, Shannon Doyne and Katherine Schulten collected teaching ideas in a post, Teachers Respond to the Crisis in Japan. What a service they continue to provide!

We encourage you to share your teaching and learning ideas and your questions!

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

Talking about their own versions of place-based education, our guests on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers are:

• Diana Laufenberg, Zac Chase, and a student, Luna from the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia
• Woody Woodgate from Alaska
• David Pulling from Louisiana State University at Eunice

We asked Diana and Zac to come talk about an interdisciplinary project they did/are doing with juniors. Each student was invited to find a building in his/her neighborhood with a name on it, then to learn the history of that person and the building. From there, students created multimedia presentations. Diana and Zac brought this example to their conversation at last month’s Educon 2.3, and we wanted to learn more! Wait until you see this work!

David writes:

Many in my semester’s class have joined Voices on the Gulf since a couple of weeks ago, and Wednesday I’m going to give them a prompt for their first post. I’m going to start them off the same way I did the class last fall, asking them to study their back yards or neighborhoods or pastures or homes to identify some place or thing that they may take for granted and to consider the cost of losing it, etc. etc. etc. I’ll encourage them to post pix or videos as well. I’ll guide them into inquiry from there.  I hope you’ll hear from some neat students and read some neat stuff.  I’ve got an eager and industrious bunch this semester.

Also check out David’s post: Setting the table for Inquiry: Where I find myself (almost) a year after Deep Water Horizon.

If that’s not enough, our old friend from Alaska, Woody will be joining us as well. Woody has focused a lot of his scholarship and pedagogy around place-based education in rural Alaska. We have already learned a lot from him, and we look forward to re-connecting with him on Wednesday. Woody writes:

I am negotiating to go back out to rural Alaska to teach at a site that is heavily focused on what they call “relevant education” and what we have been calling place-based education.  I will be focusing on how to incorporate standards into the already established outdoor program.   Therefore, I gladly accept your invitation in hopes that I can get back up to speed with what others have been doing in this area in the last 3 years since I have been out of the classroom trenches.

Pretty exciting stuff! We hope you enjoy learning with us.

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

Steve Muth on M5 - A new feature on VoiceThread from Paul Allison on Vimeo.

We first started talking with Steve Muth and Ben Papell three-and-a-half years ago (Participation is the Most Important Part! TTT77 - 10.31.07). It's always a delight to have them on Teachers Teaching Teachers because they are both such great listeners! Over the years, they have demonstrated how important teachers' voices are to them in the development of VoiceThread.

Steve and Ben are back on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, along with VoiceThread's Community Director Katie Beck. This was their 10th visit to our show.

The folks at VoiceThread had a "big feature release" to talk about, M/5 Commenting. This is how they describe it:

A new version of VoiceThread allows people to not only comment/draw/manipulate media but to also browse entire collections of media while making a single unbroken comment. These M/5 Comments will feel a bit like screencast only they’re much smaller in file size than a video, and more importantly they are delivered to your audience in a richly interactive space. There isn’t a new button and there are no instruction or training to use. You are now simply free to navigate from image > to video > to document > to presentation slide> or any of 50 different media types without breaking your narrative comment.

If you want to practice making an M/5 Comment you can do so on this Thread here which has a varied collection of media types: http://voicethread.com/share/1628729/ We think this feature is a logical evolutionary step towards VT's goal of allowing someone to simply, but fully and richly, express themselves in an asynchronous conversation. (Version 5.0 will be a hologram;)

 So they talk about M/5 Commenting, but it was just nice to catch up with them. If you use VoiceThread with your students (or would like to) please listen to this podcast, and give Ben, Steve and some feedback on the new VoiceThread features. They always take good notes!

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

Matt Montagne joins us on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers. Matt has been a leader in putting together a 24-hour Earthcast in April the last couple of years at Earthbridges.net. Matt also helped us build the community and to launch Voices on the Gulf. Matt’s students have also been building the Gator Radio Experience at his school, Castilleja School. Please join Matt, Peggy George and others as we try to build some curriculum together, looking toward Earth Day 2011. Here's the link to a Google Doc that Matt opened during this webcast: Missions Brainstorm.

Click Read more to see Paul Allison's description of why we might want to create curriculum missions for Youth Voices and to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.