youth voices

Share what's new on this week's episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers (TTT). We have an exciting line-up of topics and guests over the next several weeks, and so on this episode we decided to learn from each other.

TTT started with a group of teachers getting together, just sharing what they are noticing, dreaming of, connecting with and doing that was awesome. On this episode of TTT we continue that tradition.

Paul Allison and Monika Hardy are joined by Fred Mindlin, Jo Paraiso, Jerery Hyler, Joel Malley, Jim Nordlinger, and Loren ELF:

We talk a bit about our recent learning experiences at this year's DML conference, introduce new teachers who have just started using Youth Voices, and just basically catch up with each other.

Using Monika Hardy's notion of Detox, we talk about what we are noticing, dreaming of, connecting to, and doing that's awesome.

Enjoy! There are lots of ideas and plans here that we would love to involve you in as well.

On this episode of TTT, we finish Digital Learning Day http://www.digitallearningday.org/ with a conversation about open badges.

Paul Allison takes some time to reflect on a the use of badges in his high school English class, and look who joins him:

+Anthony Flores http://youthvoices.net/users/anthonyf- One of the first students to earn 15 badges and earn a credit in English: http://youthvoices.net/play

+Emily Goligoski, Open Badges Design & Community Lead at the Mozilla foundation who can help us think about Mozilla's Open Badge Infrastructure and Badge Backpacks. http://openbadges.org/en-US/

+Paul Oh, Senior Program Associate at National Writing Project, involved in many technology projects.

+Christina Cantrill who works with the National Writing Project and directs the Digital Is project http://digitalis.nwp.org

+Karen Fasimpaur who currently runs a small educational technology company that works with mobile technology integration in schools.http://www.k12handhelds.com/ She also runs the K12 Open Ed web sitehttp://www.k12opened.com/blog/and more!

+monika hardy, and +Paul Allison are on this episode as hosts, although Paul asked Karen if she would facilitate this episode of TTT because he wanted to talk about his experiments with badges, using P2PU, Open Badge Backpacks, and Youth Voices.

Enjoy listening to us trying figure out what we've been up to!

We are joined by colleagues from England and Australia on this episode of TTT as we follow-up with them on an earler conversations about blogging in elementary schools: http://edtechtalk.com/node/5156.

Our goal is simple: we want to make plans for elementary school students to find and respond to each others blog posts this spring. Joining us on this episode of TTT are Makewaves’ Cliff Manning, KidBlog’s Matt Hardy, Sue Waters from EduBlogs, and some of us are from Youth Voices. We are also joined by David Mitchell, the Quadblogging guru and Linda Yollis an elementary school teacher in Los Angeles who Quadblogs her own way.

Suzie Boss describes Quadblogging like this in a September 25, 2012 post in Edutopia:

The idea is deceptively simple. Four teachers agree to have their students comment on each other's blogs in an organized fashion. Each week, one of the four gets a turn as the spotlight class. The other three classes visit and leave comments. Over the course of a month, every student's work gets read and commented upon. Along the way, students learn about respectful online communication. They may decide to revise their thinking if a commenter shares a perspective they haven't considered.

On this episode of TTT Paul Allison, @paulallison is joined by Cliff Manning, @cliffmanning, Sue Waters, @suewaters, David Mitchell, @DeputyMitchell, Gail Desler, @gaildesler, Linda Yollis, @lindayollis, Matt Hardy, @hardy101, and Suzie Boss, @suzieboss.

On his blog, David Mitchell describes Quadblogging like this:

QuadBlogging is a leg up to an audience for your class/school blog. Over the last 12 months 100,000 pupils have been involved in QuadBlogging from 3000 classes in 40 countries....

A Blog needs an audience to keep it alive for your learners. Too often blogs wither away leaving the learners frustrated and bored. Quadblogging gives your blog a truly authentic and global audience that will visit your blog, leave comments and return on a cycle. Here’s how it works:

You sign up using the form below, shortly after, you will be allocated a Quad four schools/classes including your own. Each Quad has a co-ordinator who is responsible for making sure each of the quad members know what is going on and when. Each week one blog is the focus blog with the other three blogs visiting and commenting during that week. In week two, another school/class blog is the focus with the other three visiting and commenting. This is repeated until each of the classes/schools has had their week in the spotlight. The cycle is then repeated. However, this time, your pupils know what is coming – They will work harder than you have seen them work in order to get content on their blog!

QuadBlogging has been mentioned very highly in recent OfSTED Reports here in the UK and praised for offering opportunities for:“profound impact in developing pupils’ team working, communication and problem-solving skills.”

It’s simple – Give it a try, sign up here.

So you want your K-6 students to blog because you want them to have an audience beyond your classroom. What do you do? Do you set up a blog for each student or for your class, perhaps using http://edublogs.org? Do you join us at http://youthvoices.net or do you join http://kidblog.org ? And there are plenty of other choices.

But here's the rub: How do you get your students' posts out there in the world to get responses from K-6 students like them? How can be build a stronger community of elementary school teachers whose students are blogging together?

We would like to invite you to help us consider some of these questions with the amazing educators on this episode of TTT.

Gail Desler, Gail Poulin, Kevin Hodgson, Margaret Simon, Matt Hardy, Paul Allison, Suzie Boss, and Tony Iannone

Consider QuadBlogging and other complications around having your own class EduBlog or working in a community like Youth Voices or KidBlog, and the problems and delights of having different ages working together, or not?

Gail Desler and Kevin Hodgson started this conversation in November at NCTE and they would like to see if it might not be possible to get something started with NWP elementary school teachers around some sort of community that gets more and more comments flowing.

Here's Gail's recent email that led us to schedule a TTT around this topic:

I would love to head into the New Year with some shared discussions on creating an elementary community of digital kids/digital writers that would lead into YouthVoices, but would actually be its own community. As I mentioned to both of you at NCTE, I'm spurred on by Suzie Boss's (who will be joining us on TTT) recent Edutopia post: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/quad-blogging-technology-classroom-suzie-boss Just seems like a perfect NWP project - that would be pretty easy to initiate and maintain.

That's not all! On Wednesday, January 9, 2013, we plan a follow-up conversation with many of the same people on this episode. Join us at http://edtechtalk.com/ttt on Wednesday, 1.9.13 at 5PM ET/2PM PT/World Times: http://goo.gl/024pD

On this episode of TTT, we re-mix Karen Fasimpaur's Keynote for the K12 Online Conference strand: Visioning New Curriculum.

Welcome to day one of the 2012 K-12 Online Conference! All presentations are listed and linked on our main conference schedule.

Presentation Title: Visioning New Curriculum

Presentation Description: This keynote session by Karen Fasimpaur for the “Visioning New Curriculum” strand talks about the unique opportunities presented by Common Core, digital tools, openness, and innovation. The time for one-size-fits-all, top-down curriculum is over. This session gives examples of curriculum that is personalized, real world, iterative, and collaborative. It is time for a new era in curriculum — one that is digital, open, innovative, and built by and for our community. This video includes reflection questions which can be explored collaboratively athttps://p2pu.org/en/groups/k12-online-2012/ The ideas in this video were developed collaboratively with a group of many people much smarter than me. Thanks to everyone who played along. This process was a testament to the power of collaboration and of creation as way to reflect and learn.

iPod video http://blip.tv/file/get/K12online-VisioningNewCurriculum681.m4v

mp3 audio http://blip.tv/file/get/K12online-VisioningNewCurriculum464.mp3

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Link to presentation’s supporting documents

https://p2pu.org/en/groups/k12-online-2012/content/visioning-new-curriculum-strand/

Additional InformationP2PU K12 Online group – https://p2pu.org/en/groups/k12-online-2012/

Maker Faire – http://makerfaire.com

Junior FIRST LEGO League –http://www.juniorfirstlegoleague.org

Supercomputing Challenge – http://www.challenge.nm.org

National Writing Project – http://www.nwp.org

Youth Voices – http://youthvoices.net

NanoWrimo – http://www.nanowrimo.org

P2PU – http://www.p2pu.org

Common Core State Standards – http://www.corestandards.org

SETDA “Out of Print: Reimagining the K-12 Textbook in a Digital Age” – http://setda.org/web/guest/outofprint

OER for K-12 – http://content.k12opened.com

PhET Simulations – http://phet.colorado.edu

YouthVoices curriculum challenges and grid – http://youthvoices.net/play

Click Read more to see the chat that was happening during this live webcast.