George Mayo

Teachers Teaching Teachers #115 - Imagining a New Chapter- 07.30.08

Paul Allison — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 11:50:58 -0500

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, right here at EdTechTalk at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA Wednesdays / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times.

For the Chat Log, click Read more, below.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #100 - Making Space on Youth Twitter - 04.16.08

Paul Allison — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 19:09:56 -0500

Just before the second issue of Space was published, Susan Ettenheim and Paul Allison, from the New York City Writing Project, were joined by:

Kevin Hodgson, a sixth grade teacher from the Western Massachusetts Writing Project
George Mayo, an 8th grade teacher from Maryland, and one of his students Pablo, an editor of the second issue of Space.
Chris Sloan, a high school teacher from the Wasatch Range Writing Project in Salt Lake City, and one of his students, Dane
Hannah, a student from the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia

Join the fun!

Listen to this podcast, as we bounce ideas off each other and plan future collaborations.
Please share Space, Issue #2 with your students.
And register your students at Youth Twitter.

2008space - via kwout

Chat Log

Teachers Teaching Teachers #98 - Learning to be Unschooly - 04.02.08

Paul Allison — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 08:57:35 -0500

Earlier this month, on Youth Twitter, a student in South Korea, Soojin wrote, "just my opinion about youthtwitter: schooly. concrete."

A bit later, Hannah, a student in Philadelphia, answered on Youth Twitter, "I think Alan's survey is a good example of how not to be 'schooly'. Students should ask questions of each other and interact."

Wow, we thought this would be an interesting conversation on Teachers Teaching Teachers. Perhaps we could have more of a Students Teaching Teachers show.

We invited Soojin, Hannah, Alan, a student from Queens, NY, Lindsea, a studnet from Honolulu, and Ben, a student from NYC to talk about the possibilities and problems with http://youthtwitter on our live webcast, Teachers Teaching Teachers.

What a great a conversation we had about Youth Twitter, and blogging, and social networking and blogging-beyond-school.

OH! We also invited some of the students' teachers. Their insights were invaluable.

We were excited to have Clay Burell, Madeline Brownstone, and George Mayo join us for this conversation as well.

Here's the first paragraph of a blog post that Soojin wrote the day after the webcast. (Click the link to read the whole post, and the responses.)

Enjoy! And pass this podcast on to your students for inspiration.

Unschooly-Youths Conversations Reflection

Posted on April 4th, 2008 by Soojin

April 3^rd, 2008 10:00 AM GMT+09, something new happened to my life. Well, yes to quote me that was my “first time Skyping for real-purposes” and, of course, “with bunch of White-people” that lasted more than an hour hosted by a group called TeachersTeachingTeachers (not to forget mentioning Clay Burell’s impression that it was more like StudentsTeachingTeachers :-). Many feelings crossed my heart. Oh well, yes, I was pretty nervous at first I won’t deny (so childish!). And at the same time I was very honored to join this group of 9 out of 6 billion, members consisting of Clay Burell, Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, Madeline Brownstone, Lindsea, Hannah, Alan, Mr.Mayo, and Ben, talking about the leading form of education that all world will eventually have (sorry that I couldn’t link all names; please tell me your addresses). Paul told me during the conference that my tweet in YouthTwitter: just my opinion about youthtwitter: schooly. concrete was one of the key inspiration for opening such meeting. Actually, when I decided to tweet that I was afraid if I offended anyone in YouthTwitter but I decided to become honest because I wanted YT to improve. I’ve been blogging since last year, connected since about a month ago, and now I made a difference. Very meaningful.

No Music No Civilization » Unschooly-Youths Conversations Reflection

Chat Log (Don't miss this one.)

Image by Lindsea

Teachers Teaching Teachers #92 - Many Voices for Darfur - 02.20.08

Paul Allison — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:02:00 -0600

Listen to this podcast of 8th grade students from Maryland and Virginia talking about Darfur.

Then go to Many Voices for Darfur with you students and have them add their thoughts.

Thursday and Friday, March 6 and 7, 2008

Many Voices for Darfur

For 48 hours, starting at midnight Eastern standard time on March 6, 2008, many student voices will be collected in the name of those suffering in Darfur. Be sure that your voice is among them. Men, women, and children in the Darfur region of Sudan are dying. The Sudan militia and Janjaweed are responsible for as many as 500,000 deaths and 2,500,000 displaced refugees. You can learn more about the genocide taking place in Darfur by visiting the Many Voices for Darfur Wiki. Once you have had a chance to learn more about Darfur, please post your comment to one or more of the following prompts below:

If you could visit the camps in Chad and sit down one-on-one with a refugee who is your age, how would you explain what you or others are doing in your country to spread awareness and make a difference?
Write an open letter to Omar al-Bashir pleading your case for the Darfur region of Sudan.
Write an open letter to leaders in your country to make a case for government support of international efforts in Darfur.

Please read these RULES and GUIDELINES before posting your comment.

Chat Log

Teachers Teaching Teachers #90: Microblogging our way toward global awareness 02.06.08

Paul Allison — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 13:07:42 -0600

Some educators, including some of us who meet regularly on Teachers Teaching Teachers, have begun to find places in our curriculum for microblogging.

“Compared to regular blogging, microblogging fulfills a need for an even faster mode of communication. By encouraging shorter posts, it lowers users’ requirement of time and thought investment for content generation. This is also one of its main differentiating factors from blogging in general. The second important difference is the frequency of update. On average, a prolific blogger may update her blog once every few days; on the other hand a microblogger may post several updates in a single day.” (Java Akshay, Tim Finin, Xaiodan Song, Bell Tseng, Why We Twitter: U nderstanding Microblogging Usage and Communitites. August 12, 2007)

At the beginning of this podcast we explore microblogging with David Karp, the 21-year-old fou nder of Tumblr, an interesting new blogging platform that some of us have begun to use. VoiceThread founders, Ben Pappel and Steve Muth join us in this conversation as well. (Read more about microblogging below.)

In the last 15 or 20 minutes, (beginning at 31:14) we are joined by George Mayo, an 8th grade teacher in Maryland, and Wendy Dexler, a 3rd grade teacher in Florida, who joined each other at Educon 2.0 to create a Global Darfur Awareness Event which will take place on March 6th. (Read more about this project below.)

Chat Log