EdTechTalk - Teachers Teaching Teachers

Chat Log for TTT #190 - Listening to Student Gamers (and Suzie Boss) - 03.03.10

TTT Team — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:52:50 +0000

20:41:10 mschoenberger109: Just getting ready for the show and checking this out for the first time.
20:41:55 mschoenberger109: just learned not to refresh!
20:47:38 Paul Allison: Hello Ms Schoenberger, Welcome.
20:47:48 Paul Allison: we'll be starting soon, we hope.
20:47:57 Paul Allison: http://paulallison.tumblr.com/
20:49:02 Paul Allison: http://paulallison.tumblr.com/post/422924216/calling-all-gamers-this-wee...
20:50:55 mschoenberger109: Hello. This is my first time here. Sounds interesting.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #190 - Listening to Student Gamers (and Suzie Boss) - 03.03.10

TTT Team — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:26:18 +0000

Recently the group of teachers whose students are using Youth Voices have been paying more attention to both the gamers in our classrooms and to the educational leaders who are suggesting that we consider bringing gaming into the curriculum. We are looking for ideas, answer to our questions and inspiration from students like Jake and critical friends like Suzie Boss, both of whom join us on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers.

Jake is a senior in Chris Sloan's New Media class at Judge Memorial High School in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Suzie Boss is the co-writer with Jane Krauss of Reinventing Project-Based Learning, and she has recently interviewed Jane McGonigal for WorldChanging.

Jake is a senior in Chris Sloan's New Media class at Judge Memorial High School in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Suzie Boss is the co-writer with Jane Krauss of Reinventing Project-Based Learning, and she has recently interviewed Jane McGonigal for WorldChanging.

The invitation that we sent for this episode remains an open one. We would love to hear how you and your students are bringing the world of gaming into your teaching and learning!

If you’re a student who plays games or a game designer or a teacher who resents that he doesn’t have more time to play games... If you use games in your classroom or would like to... If you want to learn more about gaming in education—like we do.... then please join us for more talk about what we’re learning about gaming! Join us at http://EdTechTalk.com/live at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA Wednesdays / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times. We’re looking for more students and teachers to join us in this quest to include games in our classrooms.

Also, we would like to take a moment to say how important it has been for us to learn about the work of others at conferences this year. This episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, which was produced and edited by Chris Sloan, and much of the innovative curriculum work that we are doing in our classrooms this spring probably would not have happened without the important work of Christina Cantrill, Paul Oh, and Elyse Eidman-Aadahl and others at the National Writing Project.

They introduced us to the work of Barry Joseph and Rafi Santo from Global Kids at the Digital Is conference, a one-day conference supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative in November 2009. And they've been nurturing our connections ever since.

Also, we owe thanks to Chris Lehmann and the teachers and students of the Science Leadership Academy for bringing us together with Suzie Boss and Jane Krauss at Educon 2.2 in January 2010. Suzie's suggestion that we take a look at Evoke helped up us find a rich gaming path to follow this spring! It's worth remembering that a lot of exciting teaching and learning can come from following up on those business cards that we exchange at conferences.

Other related Teachers Teaching Teachers episodes:

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

65:23 minutes (14.97 MB)

Teachers Teaching Teachers #191 - Katherine Schulten and the Learning Network AND "...making the case for the NWP - 03.10.10

TTT Team — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 03:06:17 +0000

n the first half of this weeks episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we had an inspiring conversation with Katherine Schulten editor of The Learning Network at the New York Times. Our theme for this week's Teachers Teaching Teachers was about increasing teacher voice in public debates. Katherine suggested how we might use The Learning Network for that.

In addition, we were joined by:

Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, director of National Programs and Site Development at the National Writing Project, University of California, Berkeley
and Andrea Zellner a leader at the Red Cedar Writing Project, Michigan State University's site of the NWP.

Andrea and many others in the chat room during the webcast gave witness to why we want to maintain federal funding for the NWP to continue -- an example of a time when we need to get our voices to be heard!

In the first half of this weeks episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we had an inspiring conversation with Katherine Schulten editor of The Learning Network at the New York Times. Our theme for this week's Teachers Teaching Teachers was about increasing teacher voice in public debates. Katherine suggested how we might use The Learning Network for that.

In addition, we were joined by:

Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, director of National Programs and Site Development at the National Writing Project, University of California, Berkeley
and Andrea Zellner a leader at the Red Cedar Writing Project, Michigan State University's site of the NWP.

Andrea and many o

thers in the chat room during the webcast gave witness to why we want to maintain federal funding for the NWP to continue -- an example of a time wh

en we need to get our voices to be heard!

"It's been a heady week for teaching and learning discussion on the Times site," writes Katherine Schulten, our first guest on this podcast. One of Katherine's jobs as an editor of the New York Times Learning Network is to moderate the comments that come in on education-related articles.

By this last weekend (3/7/2010), the article, "Building a Better Teacher, had 313 comments on it, and had been one of the top most-emailed on the Times site after it went online last Wednesday.
For several days the article about Diane Ravitch's about-face on NCLB was right up there too.
And this article, "Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets," which is about teaching Darwin and Global Warming got over 1000 comments.

A Student Opinion post from earlier this week, "Where Do You Stand on Unconcealed Handguns? "received many lively responses from "students 13 and older," who "are invited [to the Learning Network] to comment on questions about issues in the news."

If you just clicked on those links, your head is probably spinning: so many issues so little time! That's what it feels like to have a conversation with Katherine Schulten, who before she became an editor for the Learning Network was a NYC teacher and a consultant for the New York City Writing Project. Katherine was worried that she was talking too much, because she is so excited about managing the Learning Network.

We'll turned Katherine loose, then we interrupted her with a few questions. We think you'l learn a lot about the New York Times Learning Network on this podcast:

Currently, they are offering these features:

Lesson Plans — Daily lesson plans based on New York Times content.
Student Opinion — News-related questions that invite response from students age 13 and older.
Word of the Day — Vocabulary words in the context of recent Times articles.
6 Q’s About the Newss — An activity in which students answer basic questions (Who, What, Where, When, Why and How) about an article.
News Quiz — Interactive daily news quizzes on current top stories.
Student Crossword — Topical puzzles geared toward teens.

The award-winning Learning Network was created in the fall of 1998. In October 2009, they re-launched it as a Times blog.

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

67:03 minutes (15.35 MB)

Teachers Teaching Teachers #189 - Reading and Writing in Kentuckiana: Paul Hankins and student talk about their Ning - 02.24.10

TTT Team — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:07:02 +0000

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, you will learn more about RAW INcK: Reading and Writing in Kentuckiana. Our guests were one site’s student managers, Tyler, along with their teacher, Paul W. Hankins, an English Teacher and Creator of RAW INcK. (Another student-manager of the Ning, Jin joined us in the chat room.) Paul is also a teacher-consultant with the Indiana University Southeast Writing Project and a State Representative to ALAN from Indiana. Listen to find out why we are excited to connect up with RAW INcK, “A Reading and Writing Community Hosted by the Juniors of Silver Creek High School [Indiana]. Now hosting members from all across America! Go INcK!”

Learn about how they set up chat sessions with authors like these:

Ellen Hopkins, author of Crank, Burned, Impulse, Glass, and Identical.
Chris Crutcher. Crutcher’s works include Athletic Shorts, Chinese Handcuffs, Deadline, The Sledding Hill, and King of the Mild Frontier.
Kimberly Willis Holt, author of When Zachary Beaver Came to Town, My Louisiana Sky, and a host of other YA titles.

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

72:56 minutes (16.69 MB)

Teachers Teaching Teachers #186 - Texas in the house with Liz Stephens and Kerry Ballast on doing digital make-overs - 02.10.10

TTT Team — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:01:16 +0000

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers we were excited to have a conversation with Liz Stephens and Kerry Ballast about their new book, Using Technology to Improve Adolescent Writing: Digital Make-Overs for Writing Lesson.

Liz Campbell Stephens teaches graduate courses in Educational Technology and is Director of the Office of Educator Preparation at Texas State University-San Marcos. She serves on the National Writing Project’s Board of Directors and was Director of the Central Texas Writing Project for 11 years. She co-authored Technology, Reading, and Language Arts and has written numerous chapters and papers on technology and literacy. Liz is former high school English teacher and brings that experience to her work as a teacher educator, federal programs director, and consultant. Her research has centered on literacy, technology, and teacher education.

Kerry Ballast

is a Teacher Consultant for the Central Texas Writing Project and a secondary English language arts teacher with 14 years classroom experience. She has worked with students in grades 6-12 to explore various forms of writing, both traditional and digital. Currently, she works for the Texas

This podcast is another in a series of Teachers Teaching Teachers shows to feature the authors of a recent outcrop of books on new media and literacy (Copyright Clarity: 184, 135, The Digital Writing Workshop: 172, 171, 170, Teaching the New Writing: 157, 156, 155, Teaching Writing Using Blogs, Wikis, and other Digital Tools: 138) Perhaps we have the makings of a new discipline here, or at least a budding new branch on the tree of academic inquiry. See the National Writing Project's list at Teaching Now: Digital Writing Books. What would you add to this list? Let us know by adding a comment below.

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers we were excited to have a conversation with Liz Stephens and Kerry Ballast about their new book, Using Technology to Improve Adolescent Writing: Digital Make-Overs for Writing Lessons.

Stephens and Ballast guide teachers in how to successfully implement technology for writing across the curriculum and create engaging lesson plans. They outline four frames of writing–inside writing, responsive writing, purposeful writing, and social action writing–and present student-centered and inquiry-based reading/writing lessons to connect real-world writing to content area standards. The result is a state-of the-art resource for helping teachers teach every student to write inside and outside of the classroom.

Kerry Ballast is a Teacher Consultant for the Central Texas Writing Project and a secondary English language arts teacher with 14 years classroom experience. She has worked with students in grades 6-12 to explore various forms of writing, both traditional and digital. Currently, she works for the Texas Education Agency.

We were also joined by English teacher, Joel Malley who teaches at Cheektowaga Central School District, near Buffalo, NY. Joel is also the Tech Liaison for the Western New York Writing Project at Canisius College. Troy Hicks had a couple of things to say as well. Troy is the director of the Chippewa River Writing Project at Central Michigan University.

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

53:46 minutes (12.3 MB)

Teachers Teaching Teachers #188 - A snow day in NYC gives us a chance to do some collaborative planning - 02.26.10

TTT Team — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 03:06:09 +0000

We welcome you to eavesdrop on this impromptu planning session shared by four New York City public school teachers enjoying a rare snow day in New York City: Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, Madeline Brownstone, and Shantanu Saha.

What you will hear us discussing on this podcast is the beginning of a plan for a research and gaming curriculum and a proposal for a series of three or four professional development sessions this Spring that are focused on some portion of the game-playing and game-building curriculum that Global Kids has developed. We also have a plan for inviting other interested New York City Writing Project teachers to join us by experimenting with gaming themselves and by developing this curriculum with us.

Because of a rare snow day in New York City, four NYC Writing Project teachers used some of our "found time" to do some impromptu thinking together. Our students are using Youth Voices, and recently we agreed to build a new curriculum this Spring. We got together on Skype today to discuss our budding plans for teaching "I-Search, Diigo, and Gaming."

What our small study group, the New York City Writing Project's "Tech Thursdays" group wants to do is to create a curriculum that has modules that can fit into different types of for classes, especially core subject areas. For now we are doing this work in the following content areas:

Computer Arts (Susan Ettenheim)
English (Paul Allison and Chris Sloan)
Technology (Shantanu Saha and Madeline Brownstone)
Art (Renee Dryg and David Marini)

We are creating a curriculum that assumes that teachers will be able to commit to doing it two times a week for at least 10 weeks (or similar parameters).

Those of us working on this curriculum this Spring will build successful collaborative game-based learning experiences for our students and we will learn from our failures. At the same time, we will be constantly building the rationales and the theoretical framework for including a curriculum like this into core classes in grades 6 -12. We are thinking about how we might involve other New York City Writing Project teachers in this work, perhaps in summer institue that integrates gaming into our current Advanced Summer Institute model. We are also planning for day-long workshops and regular study groups like our Tech Thursday groups in the Fall 2010 and Spring 2011.

We would also welcome your participation! As we say in this podcast, we will be using the What's Up? section of Youth Voices to have our student-gamers become more reflective about gaming, and we'll ask the students to contribute to the knowledge based of serious gaming by developing analyses by adding Discussions to Youth Voices, for example here are Comparative Essays from the first week of our new curriculum. If you have been looking for a way for your students to join Youth Voices, perhaps you could adapt, adopt, and contribut to this curriculum as well. Please join Youth Voices, and let us know!

In the meantime, we welcome you to eavesdrop on this impromptu planning session shared by four New York City public school teachers enjoying a rare snow day in New York City: Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, Madeline Brownstone, and Shantanu Saha.

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

41:54 minutes (9.59 MB)