Out guest on this week’s Teachers Teaching Teachers is Brian Hughes, Director of Social Media, Teachers College, Columbia University and the Head of Publishing & Design, EdLab | A Research, Design and Development unit at Teachers College, Columbia University. Ron Link and Paul Allison have a conversation with with Brian about two projects that he has helped to design at Teachers College: Pocket Knowledge and After Ed.

Q. What is Pocket Knowledge?
A. PocketKnowledge is an on-line digital archive that allows users to store and retrieve their own personally-authored materials. It also allows users to post comments about all materials within the archive. In addition, PocketKnowledge is home to the Teachers College, Columbia University Gottesman Libraries Archive-an archive containing documents written by scholars such as Edward Thorndike, Paul Monroe and Maxine Greene.Q.

What is After Ed?
After Ed TV is a web-based video channel produced by EdLab at Teachers College, Columbia University. New content is published weekly, including news, documentary, and editorial segments.
 
After Ed TV is syndicated – you can get code to put our syndicated player on your website – and available for free. EdLab produces weekly content for After Ed TV, supports collaborative production at Teachers College, and invites submissions. We publish content for students and teachers of all ages who want to better understand the education sector and the changing nature of education.
 

Teachers College, with its research and teacher preparation missions, is a resource of diverse and innovative thinking about education and advancements in the understanding of learning. After Ed’s mission is to organize this knowledge production and bring it to the attention of a new audience attuned to the post-industrial era of education.

Enjoy this podcast with Brian Hughes from Teachers College’s EdLab.

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

We invite you to follow this conversation that Paul Allison had with two old colleagues, Chris Sloan and Ron Link and others. For this webcast, Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim invited two New York City teachers, Cheree Himmel and Crystal Gaskin, and two library media specialists, Karen Levy and Michael Dodes, to meet Chris and Ron and to be welcomed into the Teachers Teaching Teachers/Youth Voices community of educators. At the time, these teachers were a day away from finishing a 3-week Summer Institute with the New York City Writing Project. Paul and Shantanu Saha were the facilitators for this Institute.

The teachers from the NYCWP Summer Institute who joined us for the first time on this podcast:
Cheree Himmel, English Teacher, Queens Vocational & Technical High School, Long Island City, Queens
Crystal Gaskin, Special Education Teacher, Queens Vocational & Technical High School, Long Island City Queens

Two librarians, who were also in the NYCWP Summer Institute, and who were not new to TTT:
Karen Levy, Library Media Specialist, Christopher Columbus High School, Bronx
Michael Dodes, Library Media Specialist, samuel Gompers Career/Technonogy Ed High School, Bronx

Old Friends of Teachers Teaching Teachers and Youth Voices who joined us:
Chris Sloan, Judge Memorial Catholic High School , Salt Lake City, Utah,
Ron Link, Assistant Principal of Organization, Academy for Scholarship and Entrepreneurship, Bronx, NY

The conversation meanders from Crystal imagining ways to use cell phones in her classroom to new attitudes that Cheree is adopting to prepare for bringing more technology into her classroom. Ron and Paul talk about some of the "hard looks" that leaders in schools need to take when thinking about professional development that allows teachers the time they need to bring technology into their classrooms. Chris and Paul talk about the many ways they are re-thinking their curriculum and use of Youth Voices this Fall. Michael Dodes leads the group in two more conversations, one about Library Databases and another about Creative Commons, Fair Use, Inline Linking and Public Domain images.

We hope that this conversation feels like an invitation. We'd love for you to join our small group of far-flung educators, and connect your students with ours this coming school year.

Our guest on this Teachers Teaching Teachers podcast is David Colarusso, developer of communityCounts and a moderator of Ask the President.

A few weeks ago, as soon as Paul Allison had finished reading about “Ask the President” in The Nation, Barack Obama was conducting his first online town hall. Obama answered questions that had been voted to the top at WhiteHouse.gov, an exciting new process which was molded on a project that was created and is being hosted by our guest, David Colarusso, “a 30-year-old law student and former high school teacher.”

When Paul read that this web innovator and activist was a former teacher, he started thinking that David may have some thoughts about how my students and the students involved in our social network, http://youthvoices.net, might get involved in the “Ask The President” project or other communityCOUNTS projects.

Listen to our conversation with David Colarusso about “leveraging your voice for change.” We asked him how to “spark, collect, rank, and compel discussion for an assortment of web-content from Flickr to YouTube” using communityCounts.

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

Susan Ettenheim and Paul Allison welcome colleagues Ron Link (NYC Writing Project), Gail Desler (Area 3 Writing Project in California), and Fred Hass (Boston Writing Project) for a conversation about collaboration, publishing, and building a responsive community of students, mainly within our work together on Youth Voices.

Please listen to how we talk to each other, then plan to join us in the future.

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

Got a video project? Wish you did? Want to provide a platform for your students’ videos?

Listen to this podcast to learn about an exciting opportunity for your students to make videos that address the Obama Administration.

David Cole from the Pearson Foundation and Paul Oh from the National Writing Project joined us on this episode on Teachers Teaching Teachers. We invited them to talk about the latest iteration of the Letters to the Next President project that involves video.

A National Writing Project teacher, Chris Sloan, who had already registered for the project, joined as well to talk about his purposes and motivations for involving his students in the project. Ron Link, a video teacher from the Bronx added

On this podcast you'll learn more about -- then you'll probably want to sign up for:

Letters to the Next President: The Video Campaign Encourages Teen Filmmakers to Address Obama Administration - National Writing Project

Letters to the Next President: The Video Campaign, sponsored by the Pearson Foundation and the National Writing Project (NWP), encourages filmmakers ages 13–18, with the support of their teachers, to voice their points of view by creating and sharing digital videos about the issues they want President Obama and his new administration to address.

The video campaign extends the popular Letters to the Next President letter-writing campaign launched in 2008 by NWP and Google Docs, which engaged over 6,500 high school and middle school students across the United States, as well as the hundreds of teachers and mentors who guided them. Students identified topics that reflected their specific personal, regional, and age-related interests, and with the help of Google Docs published their work online for their peers, parents, and the public on the Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future website: www.letters2president.org.

The new initiative is open to all young people whose teachers register their class to participate. The deadline for registration is March 27, 2009. Full registration and publication guidelines can be found at www.digitalartsalliance.org. In early April, participating teachers will be able to upload their students’ videos and publish them for the global community. The complete collection of student work will be posted at www.digitalartsalliance.org and www.letters2president.org.

Enjoy the pocast, and sign up this week!

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If you're an English teacher or a photography or media teacher, wondering if or when to introduce your students to Youth Voices, this might be the podcast for you.

Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim were joined this week by their colleague of many years, Chris Sloan, who teaches English, media and photography at Judge Memorial Catholic High School in Salt Lake City Utah.

Paul, Susan and Chris introduced their work with students and each other to Ron Link, a English and video teacher in the Bronx, who has recently begun to work with the New York City Writing Project, and with Fred Haas, the Technology Liaison for the Boston Writing Project, and teacher of English and screenwriting.

There is so much more for us to learn from each other. Listen to this podcast, then Join us!

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