Teachers Teaching Teachers #97 - Foxfire for the Firefox Generation - 03.26.08

Submitted by Paul Allison on Mon, 2008-04-14 00:04.
  • Length: 45:00 minutes (10.34 MB)
  • Format: Mono 44kHz 32Kbps (VBR)

This podcast begins with a focus on the work of two technology teachers and two students from The Baccalaureate School for Global Education (BSGE) in Astoria, NY. Madeline Brownstone and Shantanu Saha describe their two-year technology curriculum that has students doing global, multimedia projects.

Madeline and Shantanu have been working with schools here in the US through the New York City Writing Project and World Bridges/EdTechTalk. And their students have been participating in a project with a school in the Netherlands with iEarn.

More recently their students have also begun working with teachers and students involved with the Horizon Project, which was founded by Vikki Davis and Julie Lindsay. Listen to hear how these teachers and students integrate these national and international projects with the curricular expectations of a technology concentration that leads to an International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma.

That might be enough, but Madeline and Shantanu and their students also found wonderful ways to relate their work to the collaborative study of rural culture that is being planned by Lee Baber in Virginia and Woody Woodgate in Alaska. Woody tells his students that they are natives of Alaska and the digital worlds.

In this podcast we explore all of these ways of connecting urban, rural, global, and digital youths!



IB

Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 2008-04-14 19:50.
IB is a political indoctrination program. Kids have been doing rigorous school work in private schools for years. Public schools have left many kids behind. You don't need IB to raise standards, all you need is a set curriculum that allows the teachers to require more writing projects, etc. This is done all the time in private and parochial schools without having to pay the enormous cost associated with IB. We have a family member who attended one year in an IB program and then transferred to a Catholic High School. She acknowledges that the Catholic High school/college prep was far more challenging than IB. Parents are being fooled again that their kids are getting a solid academic education. It's one fad after another in public schools. When will they simply raise the standards for all students starting in Kindergarten?