Teachers Teaching Teachers

 Writing in the Digital Age - A special National Writing Project show - TTT129 - 11.12.08 [68:05m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

On this special episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim — with Alice Barr, a technology teacher in Yarmouth, Maine — welcomed to the show a couple of teachers, a couple of Writing Project Directors, and a researcher of Writing Projects. These folks (along with James Shiroff from the Denver Writing Project) will be presenting and facilitating a 2-hour session at the National Writing Project’s 2008 Annual Meeting this week. The name of their featured presenation, “Writing in the Digital Age,” identifies some of the issues discussed on this podcast.

• Seth Mitchell, high school teacher and Tech Liaison for the Maine Writing Project (University of Maine)
• Sarah Hunt-Barron, middle school teacher, teacher consultant of the Upstate Writing Project in South Carolina and doctoral student at Clemson University
• Rebecca Kaminski, Director Upstate Writing Project in South Carolina and professor at Clemson University, SC
• Felicia George, Associate Director of the New York City Writing Project at Lehman College, NY
• Laura Stokes, Inverness Research in California

We think you’ll enjoy this conversation whether or not you are planning to join these folks at the National Writing Project’s Annual Meeting in San Antonio November 20 and 21.

These Writing Project teachers and their colleagues also shared stories about how they support their fellow teachers to further their development in teaching writing in a digital environment. Many interesting ideas about the students’ enthusiasm for writing to real audiences and generating more writing were discussed along with issues that local programs face when offering professional development services to teachers in their area.

  Go to EdTechTalk to see a transcript of the chat that was happening at the same time as the webcast.

 Halloween, Screamo/Emo, and the Day of the Dead - TTT126 -10.22.08 [36:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Find out what happens when you bring together two Spanish Language teachers from the USA, an Emo student, and an English Language teacher from Mexico. On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, Susan Ettenheim and Paul Allison invited three new teachers and a student to join them to think about how to connect accross and through cultures and language.

Joining us on this show:

• Christian, a 10th grader at East West School of International Studies, Flushing, NYC, USA
• Señorita Leslie Davison, Tercer grado de una primaria en Colorado, USA
• Marcy Webb, 8th grade Spanish teacher at the Watkinson School, Hartford, CT, USA
• Angeles B, an English as a Foreigh Language teacher on an island off the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico
• Bill Oneal, an English Teacher from Trenton Central High School, West, Trenton, NJ, USA

Join the Spanish Language Group
What are your ideas about Halloween and el Día de los Muertos? What are the similarities? What are the differences? Which would you/do you prefer to celebrate? Why?

We invite you to join the teachers and students who are posting their “Thoughts About Halloween and el Día de los Muertos” in the Spanish Language group on Youth Voices.

El Grito de Valle
This is a running event Señorita Leslie Davison’s dual language elementary school in Colorado puts on every fall to celebrate Mexico’s Independence. This year they had over 300 runners!

Join the Screamo/Emo Group

On the Youth Voices Screamo/Emo Group students began by asking each other:

1. Why is music so important to us and why do we need it?
2. Have you ever heard a song with such a deep meaning that it changed the way you think now?

Christian, a 10 grader at East-West School of International Studies, and the founding manager of the Screamo/Emo group invites you to add your thoughts about these questions.

Go to EdTechTalk to see the log of the simultaneous chat that was happening during the show.

 What if you ask the students what they think? TTT125 - 10.15.08 [59:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Three amazing young women joined us on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers:

• Farisa, 10th Grader at East-West School of International Studies, Flushing, NY, NY
• Hannah, 11th Grader at Science Leadership Academy, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Lindsea, 12th Grader at Punahou School, Honolulu, Hawaii

Paul Allison, Alice Barr, and Gail Desler stayed out of the way as much as possible. We asked the students to help us keep on track with the mission of Youth Voices: to be “a space where teachers nurture student-to-student conversations, collaborations, and civic actions.” We seek to sustain student sponsored work on our new site.

  Go to EdTechTalk to see the chat transcript.

 What does the PBS Newshour, YouTube and Youth Voices have in common? TTT124 - 10.01.08 [68:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Elizabeth (Lizzy) Berryman, Director of the PBS Teacher Center in Virginia and Chris Sloan, a high school teacher in Salt Lake City, Utah joined us to talk about a collaborative project between YouTube and the PBS News Hour called “Video Your Vote.” The purpose of this project is to look at the actual voting process. The project involves Flip Cams for high school teachers (especially ones in battle ground states) that want to have interview the voting age kids in the school or have students interviewing adults about the voting process. Lizzy joined us on the first half of this podcast to and answer some questions about the project.

In the second half of the show we help a teacher new to http://youthvoices.net set up a group and register her 7th graders on Youth Voices.

Do you have students in your classes who are voting for the first time?

The NewsHour and PBS are partnering with YouTube on an exciting new project called “Video Your Vote,” which will look at the health of democracy in America by focusing on issues surrounding voting and attitudes towards voting.  Each class will record and upload 10 short videos about the voting experience, contributing to a special YouTube pool of clips on the topic.

There are a variety of ways the videos can be shot. They could be perspectives from students who will be voting in the election for the first time, interviews with parents, teachers and school staff about their past voting experiences, or interviews with election officials about how they are preparing for the election and what they are expecting. Students could visit a retirement community to speak with elderly voters, or if the school will be a voting station they can talk to whoever is in charge. This project is a work in progress so we are certainly open to your ideas.

There is also a voting day component to the project. The good folks who are soponsoring this project would like students to take the cameras to the polls on Nov. 4 if possible.  This can happen in a variety of ways, but a few possibilities are sending the cameras with students voting for the first time, or accompanying a few students to a polling place to interview people after they vote. There will be a special “How To” video from YouTube that will give guidelines for video taping at the polls.

Please email Lizzy if you are interested in getting involved in this program at eberryman@newshour.org.

 What were they thinking? A Virtual Staff Meeting with Youth Voices Teachers - TTT123 - 09.24.08 [59:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Youth Voices is growing with new teachers and students every week. If you are interested in finding out what the teachers involved in this project have been thinking about, this podcast might be for you.

Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim, both from New York City were joined by Gail Desler from California and Sarah Sutter from Maine.

Listen, then join us at http://YouthVoices.net

Go to EdTechTalk to find the Chat Log

 From Google Docs for Presidents to Drupal sites for Youth Voices - TTT122 - 09.17.09 [72:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

On this week’s Teachers Teaching Teachers, we followed up on two collaborative projects that some of us have been working on: a new Drupal site for Youth Voices and “Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future”

Paul Oh stopped by to report on the launch of the Website for teachers, which allows us to post student writing to the Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future website. Paul Oh directed us to the website where: “At the secure area of that site, you will be able to log in using your Google account information. Once you do so, further directions will help you manage your students’ pieces that were published using the special project submission
template described in Step 2. At that point, your students’ work will be publicly visible along with all the writing from across the country.”

Several teachers have tip-toed into Youth Voices, and on this podcast we report on the mechanics of joining this site and creating groups. Listen in, then consider having your students join us.

We invited several teachers and student to come talk about the site. In particular we talked about how to use the groups function of our new Drupal baby. (Thanks Bill Firtzgerald!) For
example, we set up a Digital Photography Community Group and a literature-focused inquiry group, “Catastrophe and Resiliency“:

A space where we can take a stand against historical and current atrocities, genocides, ethnic cleanings, holocausts, occupations, and wars. A place to share our responses to books and stories about how humaity can not be stopped by these catastrophes, and how we must never again turn away from these disasters. A forum where we can connect around books, stories, and poems at all levels of difficulty and variety, books like Long Way Gone, What is the What? Persepolis, Maus, Night and other stories of spirit in the face of calamity.

Lindsea, a student from Hawaii joined us, and many others.

Looking for collaborative projects? Want to find out more? Listen to this podcast, and join in the coming weeks as we continue to plan together on Teachers Teaching Teachers.

 The National Writing Project and Google Team Up To Give High School Students a Voice - TTT120 - 09.03.08 [59:25m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

On this podcast we talk with four guesrts about Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future, an exciting collaborative project sponsored by the National Writing Project and Google:

• Andrew Chang, Product Marketing Manager at Google
• Gail Desler, Tech Liaison for the Area 3 Writing Project in Northern California
• Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, co-director of the National Writing Project
• Paul Oh, the coordinator of the technology liaison program for the National Writing Project

Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future is open to U.S. teachers and mentors working with students ages 13–18. The project requires that the teacher have a parent/guardian permission (PDF) on file for each student prior to publishing their work on the Web and requires that students and teachers have Internet connectivity and use or create a free Google account.

Google accounts allow teachers and students to use Google Docs to compose, collaborate, edit, and share writing through Internet-accessible documents. The Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future website provides a secure way for teachers to publish students’ publication-ready writing to a high-profile website intended to feature strong, well-reasoned, and persuasive writing by young people.

Interested teachers should read How to Participate and then register [at http://nwp.org] by September 12. Publishing of student letters and essays occurs through October 30, 2008. Please note, in order to register for this project, you must first have an account on NWPi,

Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future

For the Chart Log, check EdTechTalk.

 Kicking the tires on a new Drupal site - TTT119 - 08.27.08 [76:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Listen in as we kick the tires on a new Drupal site that we will be using this fall to connect our students. This summer Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim invited Alice Barr, George Mayo, and Chris Sloan to work with Bill Fitzgerald and his colleagues at Funny Monkey to create a Drupal site for Youth Voices. In the weeks to come we will be inviting you to have you join our students as they begin to publish their images, videos, text, and audio on Youth Voices. Please plan to join us.

For the Chat Log go to EdTechTalk.

 Interactive Communications and Simulations with Jeff Stanzler - TTT118 - 08.20.08 [55:05m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Our guests on this podcast were:

• Jeff Stanzler. University of Michigan-Flint and Ann Arbor, School of Education, Interactive Communications and Simulations, USA
• Kurt Hansen, government teacher, Bishop Hartley High School, Columbus, Ohio, USA
• Abbi Gee, English teacher, Da Vinci High School, Jackson, Michigan, USA
• Traci Gizzi, social studies teacher, Winston Curchilll High School, Livonia, Michigan, USA

Listen to learn about the web-based simulations and writing projects
hosted by the University of Michigan’s Interactive Communications & Simulations group. With the help of university student mentors, students in classrooms around the world are trying to resolve the Arab-Israeli Conflict, or are exploring modern China, or bringing historical figures to life as they debate the world’s responsibilities in Darfur. Hear from teachers and a former university student mentor about an array of projects your students can join as soon as this fall, which offer fertile ground for exercising their creative imaginations, writing with a purpose, and sharing their ideas with an engaged audience of peers.

“arab-israeli-conflict-3,” uploaded on July 20, 2006 by ManilaRyce

  See EdTechTalk for the Chat Log.

 Thinking about Classroom Blogging with Sarah Hurlburt - TTT117 - 08.13.08 [70:55m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In the midst of planning a re-launch of a school-based social network, Youth Voices, we happened upon a paper that clearly and fairly described the problems many of us face when we blog with students in our classrooms. In her paper in the June 2008 Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT Vol. 4, No. 2), Sarah Hurlburt discusses some of “frustrations and puzzlements” that many of us have had in using classroom blogs over the past several years.

Sarah articulates our reasons for wanting to set up a site like Youth Voices. Many of us have felt the gap between the promise of blogging and the results in our classrooms.

The point at which the instructor feels [classroom blogging] to have failed in some way, is when these individual written elements fail to interconnect – when the social element, upon which instructors place high hopes for a subsequent critical element – fails to materialize.

Defining Tools for a New Learning Space: Writing and Reading Class Blogs

Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim invited Sarah Hurlburt on to our webcast to continue the dialogue about blogging, and we were joined by elementary school teachers, Lisa Parisi and Linda Nitsche.

Enjoy the podcast, and read Sarah Hurlburt’s paper.

Also, we invite you to help us re-launch http://youthvoices.net on Wednesday, August 27, 2008. Join us, right here at EdTechTalk at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA Wednesdays / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times.

See EdTechTalk for the Chat Log.

 Imagining a New Chapter - TTT115 - 07.30.08 [57:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Many of us (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), have already returned or will soon return to school. Our summer weeks of reflecting, learning, dreaming, planning, scheming are behind us. Perhaps it’s useful to remember what our conversations from a few weeks back sounded like.

On this podcast, recorded a few weeks ago, Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim are joined by three other teachers who were just trying to enjoy their summer break:

• Allice Barr, a technology integrator at Yarmouth High School, Maine
• George Mayo, a middle school teacher and biker from Silver Spring, Maryland
• Margare Fiore, an English Teacher with the New School and a member with the New York City Wriitng Project

One of the projects we’ve been working on this summer — and which we discuss in this podcast — is a new Drupal site for http://youthvoices.net. We are planning to launch the new site on our webcast this week.

We invite you to help us re-launch http://youthvoices.net on Wednesday, August 27, 2008. Join us at http://EdTechTalk.com/live at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA Wednesdays / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times.

Go to EdTechTalk for the Chat Log.

 Re-thinking Youth Voices - TTT114 - 07.23.08 [61:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Over the past several weeks, Paul Allison, Alice Barr, Susan Ettenheim, George Mayo, and Chris Sloan have been working with Bill Fitzgerald and other primates at Funny Monkey to move two school-based social networks,