EdTechTalk - Teachers Teaching Teachers

Teachers Teaching Teachers #214 - VoiceThread and Teaching the iGeneration after the BP Oil Spill - 08.18.10

TTT Team — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 14:27:14 +0000

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, Steve Muth and Ben Papell founders and on-going co-conspirators at VoiceThread join Susan Ettenheim and Chris Sloan to talk about what’s new at VoiceThread AND how they can imagine VoiceThread supporting our efforts with http://voicesonthegulf.org.

In addition, Bill Ferriter, a sixth grade science teacher in North Carolina, joins us. Bill has just published a great book, Teaching the iGeneration. There are a lot great ideas in this new book, but there’s one that is perfect for a VoiceThread discussion: Collaborative vs. Competitive dialogue. In an email, Bill writes:

Collaborative and competitive dialogue is something I talk about in Teaching the iGeneration and something that VoiceThread facilitates nicely. We could talk about how our world emphasizes competitive dialogue—-kids are surrounded by marketing messages and celebrities and politicians screaming for attention and unwilling to listen to other viewpoints——but collaborative dialogue is essential for solving the kinds of global, cross-border challenges our world is facing.

Alicia Blair, a colleague and science teacher at an alternative school in Mississippi, and Gail Desler, who works with teachers in Northern California, join us as well. Alicia and Gail have been helping us to keep it real all summer.

Enjoy!

In addition, Bill Ferriter, a sixth grade science teacher in North Carolina, joins us. Bill has just published a great book, Teaching the iGeneration. There are a lot great ideas in this new book, but there’s one that is perfect for a VoiceThread discussion: Collaborative vs. Competitive dialogue. In an email, Bill writes:

Collaborative and competitive dialogue is something I talk about in Teaching the iGeneration and something that VoiceThread facilitates nicely. We could talk about how our world emphasizes competitive dialogue—-kids are surrounded by marketing messages and celebrities and politicians screaming for attention and unwilling to listen to other viewpoints——but collaborative dialogue is essential for solving the kinds of global, cross-border challenges our world is facing.

Enjoy!

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

66:35 minutes (15.24 MB)

Teachers Teaching Teachers #213 - "Sometimes the questions just lead us to think in the right direction" - 08.11.10

TTT Team — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 23:35:40 +0000

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers,we talk to teachers from the Gulf Coast again. School has started in many places along the Gulf, and there are many different and mixed reactions as the emergency has turned into a long-term clean up effort and part of a chronic crisis in the region.

On this podcast you'll learn what teachers and students on the Gulf were thinking about the BP oil spill in at the beginning of August, about 3 weeks after the cap was put on the Deepwater rig. You'll also learn why they believe that the “Voices on the Gulf” project is more important than ever. If you haven’t signed up yet. We’dlove for anybody who listens to Teachers Teaching Teachers to join the site!

We expect that students’ voices will dominate on the site once more schools start up, but we’d love to hear your plans, your thoughts, your voices on the site right now! Thanks!

On this podcast, Matt Montagne and Paul Allison are joined by:

David Pulling, National Writing Project of Acadiana, Louisiana
Stacey Ferguson, Live Oak Writing Project, Mississippi
Catherine Tibbs, Live Oak Writing Project, Mississippi
Lynette Herring-Harris, Program Associate, National Writing Project, based in Mississippi

We expect that students’ voices will dominate on the site once more schools start up, but we’d love to hear your plans, your thoughts, your voices on the site right now! Thanks!

On this podcast, Matt Montagne and Paul Allison are joined by:

David Pulling, National Writing Project of Acadiana, Louisiana
Stacey Ferguson, Live Oak Writing Project, Mississippi
Catherine Tibbs, Live Oak Writing Project, Mississippi
Lynette Herring-Harris, Program Associate, National Writing Project, based in Mississippi

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

46:56 minutes (10.74 MB)

Teachers Teaching Teachers #212 - A community of teachers building "Voices on the Gulf" - 08.04.10

TTT Team — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 00:53:22 +0000

As you will hear in this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we are very excited about the new website, http://voicesonthegulf.org ! On this podcast we are joined by:

Andrea Zellner, Stumbling Toward Proficiency
Chris Sloan, Sloan Space
Matt Montagne, The Digital Downlow
Diana Laufenberg, Living the Dream
Buffy Hamilton, The Unquiet Library
Lisa Nielsen, The Innovative Educator

As you will hear on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we are very excited about the new website, http://voicesonthegulf.org ! On this podcast we are joined by:

Andrea Zellner, Stumbling Toward Proficiency
Chris Sloan, Sloan Space
Matt Montagne, The Digital Downlow
Diana Laufenberg, Living the Dream
Buffy Hamilton, The Unquiet Library
Lisa Nielsen, The Innovative Educator

We are putting together a team to help us to develop this site — and fast. We've set up the following Community Managers:

David Pulling (Louisiana) - Site Manager
Paul Allison (New York) - Site Manager

Catherine Tibbs (Mississippi) - Art and Humanities
Ellen Steigman (Louisiana) - Art and Humanities
Susan Ettenheim (New York) - Art and Humanities

Paige Baggett (Alabama) - Community and Culture
Suzie Boss (Oregon) - Community and Culture

Jeff Mason (Florida) - Health and Wellness
Andrea Zellner (Michigan) - Health and Wellness

Natasha Whitton (Louisiana) - Money and Careers
Chris Sloan (Utah) - Money and Careers

Alicia Blair (Mississippi) - Nature and the Environment
Matt Montagne (California) - Nature and the Environment

Kyle Meador (Louisiana) - Social Issues and Human Rights
Diana Laufenberg (Pennsylvania) - Social Issues and Human Rights

Stacey Ferguson (Mississippi) - Our Space (K-6)
Margaret Simon (Louisiana) - Our Space (K-6)
Gail Desler (California) - Our Space (K-6)
Kevin Hodgson (Massachusetts) - Our Space (K-6)

Along with this growing group of National Writing Project teachers, teachers from along the Gulf Coast, teachers in Edutopia’s pblcmp, AND/OR teachers involved with the EdTechTalk/WorldBridges community, we have been organizing (and working with Bill Fitzgerald at FunnyMo nkey) to build this site that will do the following:

Provide a place where we can collect, amplify, and engage the poems, stories, and essays that students along the Gulf Coast bring to their teachers this month, as schools open.
Layer these stories, poems, and essays with online sources, including news releases and poetry (such as the poems on Poets for Living Waters).
We don’t know yet! Many of us have been working for some time on building a site like Voices on the Gulf, and we have some idea what directions this will take, AND we want to allow the discussions on the site to help us know how to develop.

The most important item, above is #1 - we are working as fast and hard as possible to get the site out to teachers, and for it to be easy to use. If you would like to add a poem, thought, or anything, please sign up, then once you’ve been made into a member, you’ll see the Add Discussion button. Please go in and write a brief reflection, add photo, a video, or almost anything — just to see how easy it is to do. AGAIN, THANKS!

Students have been coming back the past couple of weeks in many Gulf Coast schools. A lot of our connections with teachers on the Gulf have happened this summer on a live webcast that we do every Wednesday evening. You may have already been on the show. We would love it if you would come back. We’ve been able to make a lot of invaluable connections. You can see what we mean here: http://edtechtalk.com/teachersteachingteachers

We would love to invite you to join us on Teachers Teaching Teachers every Wednesday at 6:00 p.m. Pacific / 8:00 p.m. Central / 9:00 p.m. Eastern. If you use Skype, please email Paul Allison or Susan Ettenheim and let us know your Skype name (again)— just helps us to know who to look for! We hope that you will be able to join us soon on a Wednesday evening.

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

41:26 minutes (9.48 MB)

Teachers Teaching Teachers #211 - A Real Team Challenge: Spill! 07.28.10

TTT Team — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 17:39:29 +0000

This summer, we could feel the energy growing around teachers building curriculum about the BP oil spill. This episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers one example. This conversation is part of our ongoing series of podcasts focused on collecting stories, ideas, curriculum, connections, and resources that will help us teach about the Gulf oil spill this fall. Our guests include:

Teachers who worked together on project plans, It Affects Us All, in Suzie Boss’s Problem-based Learning camp at Edutopia join us.
We are also joined by Andy Rosenbloom, Program Director for the Virtual Team Challenge: Spill!

Teachers from the Gulf join us as well. Even though on this show we feature teachers and resources from "elsewhere," it is always a welcomed moment when we can hear from our new friends from along the Gulf Coast.
Oh, if you listen to the end, you'll catch Bill Fitzgerald who had just put up Voices on the Gulf hours before this webcast.

If you haven't joined us at Voices on the Gulf and at Youth Voices, please consider joining now. These are the best ways for keeping up with the work of this community of teachers represented on this podcast this fall.

Teachers who worked together on project plans, It Affects Us All, in Suzie Boss’s Problem-based Learning camp at Edutopia join us.
We are also joined by Andy Rosenbloom, Program Director for the Virtual Team Challenge: Spill! Andy writes:

Even though you’re busy this summer with countless poolside BBQs, it’s never too early to plan ahead for Fall semester curriculum.The Virtual Team Challenge is an entirely FREE online, multiplayer business simulation that takes place in the animated 3D world of New City. The team objective in the simulation is to help the mayor stage the most efficient oil spill recovery effort. Top-performing teams are eligible for prizes for themselves, their teachers, and local charities! Virtual Team Challenge will run this Fall from October 12 – November 24. See our article in The New York Times to read about one NJ teacher’s success with the program. Virtual Team Challenge comes complete with lesson plans and in-class exercises which form a curriculum that highlights general business acumen, business ethics, negotiation skills, decision-making processes and accounting while placing a special emphasis on important life/career skills such as teamwork, communication, professionalism and research methods. Register now at www.virtualteamchallenge.com.

Teachers from the Gulf join us as well. Even though on this show we feature teachers and resources from "elsewhere," it is always a welcomed moment when we can hear from our new friends from along the Gulf Coast.
Oh, if you listen to the end, you'll catch Bill Fitzgerald who had just put up Voices on the Gulf hours before this webcast.

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

61:31 minutes (14.08 MB)

Teachers Teaching Teachers #210 - Eywitnesses to the largest oil spill in U.S. history - 07.21.10

TTT Team — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 20:07:30 +0000

The series of podcasts about the Gulf oil spill that we started at the beginning of June continues on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers.

We are joined by Alicia Blair a 5th grade science teacher from Mississippi who has been an important voice on many of these podcasts this summer.

It was also a delight to listen to Ann Dobie, author, professor, and former Writing Project Director from Louisiana.

The series of podcasts about the Gulf oil spill that we started at the beginning of June continues on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers.

We are joined by Alicia Blair a 5th grade science teacher from Mississippi who has been an important voice on many of these podcasts this summer.

It was also a delight to listen to Ann Dobie, author, professor, and former Writing Project Director from Louisiana.

Ann Brewster Dobie taught at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette for thirty-eight years, where she is now professor emerita of English. She directed graduate studies in rhetoric and the university’s writing-across-the-curriculum program. She is the author or coauthor of six college writing textbooks and author of numerous articles on literature and composition. She is the editor of Something in Common: Contemporary Louisiana Stories, Uncommonplace: An Anthology of Contemporary Louisiana Poets, and Wide Awake in the Pelican State: Stories by Contemporary Louisiana Writers. Ann received her doctorate in the teaching of writing from Columbia University.

Biography on http://anndobie.com Given our interest to work with teachers in the Gulf to collect the stories of students there, take a look at this description of Ann Dobie’s newest book, Fifty-Eight Days in the Cajundome Shelter, which was published in 2008.

Fifty-Eight Days in the Cajundome Shelter

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed thousands of homes, schools, and businesses across the Gulf Coast and changed the face of southeast Louisiana forever. However, nearly a hundred miles northwest of New Orleans, in Lafayette, Louisiana, a different story was unfolding. As men, women, and children waited on their roofs for rescue, executive director Greg Davis hurried to prepare the Cajundome in Lafayette as an emergency shelter.

The workers and volunteers in the Cajundome provided food, showers, and medical care to more than eighteen thousand evacuees that came to Lafayette. From the first busloads of newly homeless to the disasters caused by Hurricane Rita, “Fifty-Eight Days in the Cajundome Shelter” shares personal accounts of heartache and joy, tragedy and triumph. For the first time, here is a collection of the stories of the volunteers and evacuees. Their heroism, courage, and despair are etched into these stories as they endured the first few weeks in a hurricane-ravaged world.
Retold here is the bravery and leadership of Donald Williams as he took charge and led a convoy of handicapped and elderly to safety. Readers will also be captivated by the unforgettable story of the Prevost family as they climbed their way to the roof of their home and their heartbreaking journey to dry land on I-10. The author includes her own personal accounts of what really happened in the aftermath of Katrina and the bravery and selflessness of countless people who struggled to make a difference.

We are excited about the number of teachers who have joined us this summer for this exploration into how we can be good neighbors with our friends in the Gulf Coast. Al Doyle, a NYC teacher of gaming, joined us from the woods of a summer camp in Maine, and a new teacher Rebecca from Pennsylvania, had some things to say as well.

Some of the things to listen for in this podcast are some of the reasons we have been working with Bill Fitzgerald at FunnyMonkey to build an extension of our Youth Voices site. Two quotes from this podcast help define our mission for Voices on the Gulf:

I think sometimes when your there at that Ground Zero, if I can borrow that phrase, it's a little overwhelming. But I talked with several people and got together with our [Writing Project] director, and we just had a real brainstorm. And we went back again to our experience with Katrina. What did we end up doing? Not that we ever planned any of these things. It was more the spontaneous improv sort of thing. So we went back and we looked at the things that had been successful, and thought about what we would like to do for the oil spill. This time planning, with the goal being: We want to publish! We would like to do that this time.... This whole experience that we've had this summer in trying to brainstorm how to bring student voices out has really inspired us to take the initiative, instead of waiting until we see it through like we did with the hurricane, to make those efforts.
--Alicia Blair, high school science teacher and member of the Live Oak Writing Project, University of Southern Mississippi, Gulf Coast

In Louisiana after Katrina and Rita our [Writing Project] sites published any number of anthologies of student writing about those hurricanes, and about what it meant to live through the hurricanes, but even more so, through the clean up and the rebuilding. I have no doubt that that's going to happen again because our teachers always capitalize on those things which are happening in students' lives and their families' lives, and use those as sources of writing and a kind of catharsis. I have no doubt that it will happen.
--Ann Dobie, professor emerita of English, University of Louisiana, director of the Louisiana Writing Project State Network and former director of the National Writing Project of Acadiana

Also, please read:

Matt Montagne's Copy of the email I sent to my school about VOG (August 2010)
Gail Desler's Sample Parent Permission Letter (August 2010)

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

45:46 minutes (10.48 MB)

Teachers Teaching Teachers #209 - Rethinking school with four Gulf Coast teachers - 07.14.10

TTT Team — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 00:42:26 +0000

Our guests on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers are:

Kyle Meador, the Director of Education at Our School at Blair Grocery, New Orleans. To learn more about Our School at Blair Grocery, check out this video. Then click here to visit their photo slideshow. This is well worth your time! And while you are there, please contribute to their construction efforts. You'll find a donate button on the right side of the site.
We met Kyle on Edutopia’s “official PBL Camp kickoff” this Monday. This was a webinar led by Suzie Boss, and it was “attended by more than 100 campers. If you missed the live event, you can view an archived recording, and/or download the slide presentation.” Suzie also joins us on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teacher. There was a lot of synergy between Edutopia’s Problem-Based Learning Camp and our webcast this summer. It was great to be a small part of this work. All of of the materials of this camp areopen to everybody and there is PBL wiki.
On this episode, we also welcome two teachers from the Live Oak Writing Project which is on the coast in Mississippi. High school science teacher, Alicia Blair who had been with us the week before returns with a colleague, Stacey Ferguson who teaches 5th grade.
Middle-school science and technology teacher, Jeff Mason joins us once again to give us his perspectives from Pensacola, Florida.

Our guests on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers are:

Kyle Meador, the Director of Education at Our School at Blair Grocery, New Orleans. To learn more about Our School at Blair Grocery, check out this video. Then click here to visit their photo slideshow. This is well worth your time! And while you are there, please contribute to their construction efforts. You'll find a donate button on the right side of the site.
We met Kyle on Edutopia’s “official PBL Camp kickoff” this Monday. This was a webinar led by Suzie Boss, and it was “attended by more than 100 campers. If you missed the live event, you can view an archived recording, and/or download the slide presentation.” Suzie also joins us on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teacher. There was a lot of synergy between Edutopia’s Problem-Based Learning Camp and our webcast this summer. It was great to be a small part of this work. All of of the materials of this camp areopen to everybody and there is PBL wiki.
On this episode, we also welcome two teachers from the Live Oak Writing Project which is on the coast in Mississippi. High school science teacher, Alicia Blair who had been with us the week before returns with a colleague, Stacey Ferguson who teaches 5th grade.
Middle-school science and technology teacher, Jeff Mason joins us once again to give us his perspectives from Pensacola, Florida.

On this show, we talk about getting a website ready in time for the students on the Gulf Coast, to make it easy for them to share their stories, poems, photographs, essays, and cartoons with us. Bill Fitzgerald and his colleagues at FunnyMonkey pulled it off! Students are coming back along the Gulf Coast this week and next week. "Voices on the Gulf" is ready. We expect that student voices will dominate on this site eventually, but we invite you to join now, and add a discussion. What are you thinking about the BP oil spill? How will this event change your teaching?

Please plan to join us to plan curriculum and make connections with teachers in the Gulf. Browse over to http://EdTechTalk.com/live at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA every Wednesday in August./ World Times. We’ll see you then!

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

44:46 minutes (10.25 MB)