On this week’s Teachers Teaching Teachers, we had some follow-up’s, and some room for new voices. Paul Allison invited several of his students from the East-West School of International Studies in Flushing, NY onto the show to explain more about gaming. These students were listening and in the chat room on TTT#181 the week before when we talked about gaming in schools with other teachers, researchers, and consultants. The student had asked for a student-centered follow up. Listen to find out where gaming is in their lives.

And stay tuned every Wednesday evening this Spring as Paul and Susan Ettenheim and other students learn about bringing gaming into their curriculum this coming semester. If you know of a gamer, please invite him or her to join us as well! We’d love to include other students via Skype!

And if that’s not enough, this week's podcast also includes George Haines, a 6th grade teacher back on the show to talk about a Twitter project he was about to launch. George was on TTT in August: Teachers Teaching Teachers #165 - 08.26.09 - Meet Lisa Dick and George Haines: Talking about research and diigo George has written us recently to say that he hasn’t given up on “video and self-directed learning via youtube."

I haven’t scrapped that platform yet, but I decided to try to use Twitter for self-directed learning first. It is so much more nimble of a platform, I figured it would allow for a more fluid discussion and more immediate feedback and clarification.I saw that you have a youthvoices account on twitter and I just started following it. My kids are almost ready to start tweeting out their questions and connecting to other kids as part of this “KidSourcing” project. My kids are 6th graders, but I have invited any classes in the ballpark to connect with my kids. We are connecting to kids in Tanzania (http://epicchangeblog.org/2009/10/21/the-twitterkids-of-tanzania/) and I am working out the involvement with schools in Peru, Brazil, China and a couple here in the old U.S. of A. I don’t know how neatly our project meshes with what you are trying to accomplish with Youth Voices, but I figured I would reach out and gauge  your interest in connecting.Here is the basic outline for the project: The idea is to have kids search for answers from the crowd of kids with no help from the adults (aside from monitoring and guiding offline).

The idea is to seek answers to “why” questions as opposed to “What” questions. For example, a question that a kid can simply Google like “when did the civil war start?” is a bad one, but a question like “WHY did the civil war start?” is a good one. Questions that start discussions, lead to independent research and sharing links fit the bill. The idea would be to keep it loose and low impact- not a heavily dependent collaboration. I will probably tell my kids to post a new question each week and I will probably give them an arbitrary number of questions from other kids to help answer.

For the first month we will work in depth on the project, then I hope to make it part of the routine when they come to the lab, meaning they login and check twitter for 5-10 minutes before we launch into whatever other projects we are doing at the time. video and self-directed learning via youtube.I haven’t scrapped that platform yet, but I decided to try to use Twitter for self-directed learning first. It is so much more nimble of a platform, I figured it would allow for a more fluid discussion and more immediate feedback and clarification.I saw that you have a Youth Voices account on twitter and I just started following it. My kids are almost ready to start tweeting out their questions and connecting to other kids as part of this “KidSourcing” project. My kids are 6th graders, but I have invited any classes in the ballpark to connect with my kids. We are connecting to kids in Tanzania (http://epicchangeblog.org/2009/10/21/the-twitterkids-of-tanzania/) and I am working out the involvement with schools in Peru, Brazil, China and a couple here in the old U.S. of A. I don’t know how neatly our project meshes with what you are trying to accomplish with youthvoices, but I figured I would reach out and gauge  your interest in connecting.

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

 Welcome to this week's EdTechTalk (ETT) newsletter. Educon 2.2 took place this past weekend at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. Educon2.2 is in its third year, and is billed as both a conference and a conversation. Many ETT people attended and presented.  All conferences are archived on the site.

This week, we discussed how to promote learning through asynchronous discussions, in many cases, the heart of online courses. Issues considered include: developing a sense of community, structuring discussions, setting expectations, assessment and strategies for facilitating quality interactions.

Resources mentioned:

Joanna Dunlap: Down and Dirty Guidelines for Effective Discussions in Online Courses

Alice , Bob and Cheryl had our favorite conversation, the Horizon Report 2010! This is such a good report to provide the vision and checks and balances for our practice. The chat room was rocking too. Thanks for joining us. Let us know what your take is on the Horizon Report.

“Geek of the Week” Links for 2010-02-04

Join us for an exciting conversation with the inimitable and well-connected Lucy Gray who shares with us her passion for what's new in ipod/iphone educational apps, Google Teacher Academy and educational technology.

Join us as we catch up with Karin Muller of Take2 Videos as she shares her vision for the non-profit organization which she created. She was with us last year; it was great to have an update on an incredible initiative which places raw footage of areas of global conflict into the hands of North American students to create PSAs and documentaries. Karin is a world traveler and photojournalist whose work has appeared in such places as National Geographic and Discovery Channel.

Karin Muller wikipedia article

21st Century Learning #120
January 26, 2010
NCAIS with Jason Ramsden

A discussion with Jason Ramsden about the NCAIS conference. Their NCAIS blog is here.

<Chat Transcript>

Jennifer Wagner joined us while we streamed her video, If You Host It, They Will Come from the K12 Online Conference 2009. There were some issues with the video - the audio has the whole conversation.

Chat Log