On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we talk with a couple of teachers in Japan to get a local perspective on the disaster there. The other guests agreed to come on the show in the hallways of the East-West School of International Studies (East-West) in Flushing, Queens, where Paul Allison teaches English.
After inviting his principal, the founding principal of East-West, Ben Sherman onto this episode of TTT, Paul asked Ben who he knows in Japan who we could invite into the conversation. Ben immediately thought of Alan Bergman "a guy that I went to grad school with in Tokyo." Alan who teaches at a university in Tokyo, in turn, put us in touch with Eric Bossieux, providing us with this introduction:
Eric is originally from Louisiana. His father was a pilot with Japan Airlines, so Eric went to international high school in Yokohama and to Sophia University in Tokyo. He does consulting and translation work, and he has done translations for TEPCO (the company that runs the reactor in Fukushima) of their operating manuals for hydroelectric and nuclear power plants.
Rounding out this list of guests are two students, seniors from East-West, Martha and Christian.
We plan to continue to talk about these issues, questions, assessments
of the situation, and ways we can help. What can we learn and teach now
and in the future about the Great Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011?
48:07 minutes (11.01 MB)
On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers Renee Hobbs discusses her white paper, “Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action,” published in November 2010. You will enjoy this podcast if, like Renee, you have had
enough of “gee-wiz” gaping over new technology tools.” In her work, Renee seeks to identify and support projects and communities (perhaps like yours) where educators are shifting towards “a focus on critical thinking and communication skills” (xii Digital and Media Literacy). On this podcast you'll hear what Renee’s plan of action is all about. Let’s put ourselves on the map of existing resources as well following up on these other recommendations from the Executive Summary:
Support Community-Level Digital and Media Literacy Initiatives
1.
Map existing community resources and offer small grants to promote community partnerships to integrate digital and media literacy competencies into existing programs.
2. Support a national network of summer learning programs to integrate digital and media literacy into public charter schools.
3. Support a Digital and Media Literacy (DML) Youth Corps to bring digital and media literacy to under-served communities and special populations via public libraries, museums and other community centers.
Develop Partnerships for Teacher Education
4. Support interdisciplinary bridge building in higher education to integrate core principles of digital and media literacy education into teacher preparation programs.
5. Create district-level initiatives that support digital and media literacy across K–12 via community and media partnerships.
6.
Partner with media and technology companies to bring local and national news media more fully into education programs in ways that promote civic engagement.
Research and Assessment
7. Develop online measures of media and digital literacy to assess learning progression and develop online video documentation of digital and media literacy instructional strategies to build expertise in teacher education.
Parent Outreach, National Visibility, and Stakeholder Engagement
8.Engage the entertainment industry’s creative community in an entertainment-education initiative to raise visibility and create shared social norms regarding ethical behaviors in using online social media.
9. Host a statewide youth-produced Public Service Announcement (PSA) competition to increase visibility for digital and media literacy education.
10. Support an annual conference and educator showcase competition in Washington, D.C. to increase national leadership in digital and media literacy education.
Here are more resources to take a look at as well:
Read the white paper, published by the Knight Foundation, online.
Watch a video of a roundtable at the Aspen Institute in November (especially 12:10 - 34:45).
There’s so much here! We hope that you will find ways to join this movement and add to the networks for digital and media literacy with Renee Hobbs, founder of the Media Education Lab:
Renee Hobbs is one of the leading authorities on media literacy education in the United States. She is a Professor at the School of Communications and Theater at Temple University in Philadelphia and holds a joint appointment at the College of Education. She founded the Media Education Lab in the Department of Broadcasting, Telecommunications and Mass Media. She has written dozens of scholarly articles, created multimedia curriculum resources and offered professional development programs on four continents to advance the quality of media literacy education in the United States and around the world.
Please enjoy the conversation!
Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.
Several leaders in the National Writing Project--Paul Oh, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and Troy Hicks--joined us from Washington DC where
they were working to lobby members of Congress today, Thursday, March 31.
Also Chad Sansing, Zac Chase, and Andrea Zellner joined us on the Skype conversation--as well as many friends in the chat. Chad has been organizing a
blogging effort going on around the country. Here’s what he is asking
supporters of the NWP to do:
Please add your voice to the chorus of educators from around the country who are blogging in support of the NWP.
We’re trying to accumulate 1,000 blog posts by April 8, when the next
Continuing Resolution for the federal budget expires. There are already
nearly 150 posts - moving stories of the impact of the NWP on the lives
of teachers and students - at the archive: http://coopcatalyst.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/the-blog4nwp-archive/ You can tweet or email your blog post URL to Chad Sansing (twitter: @chadsansing; email: csansing@gmail.com)
who has been organizing this effort, or post it to this discussion and
we’ll make sure it gets added to the archive. Remember to try to tag
your posts with: #blog4nwp. FYI, we’ve gotten a few responses on
twitter to this effort from the press office of the Department of
Education (see: http://www.andrea-zellner.com/archives/629 and http://aetweets.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/blog4nwp-and-being-bossy/), so let’s keep it up!
Check out what folks have written to get an idea of what you might add
but more importantly take a few minutes to add your story (stories).
Listen to find out what we can do to help restore funding to the National Writing
Project. Then find your own ways to add your voice the the the chorus singing praises to the
National Writing Project!
Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.
58:50 minutes (13.47 MB)
The day after this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, Chris Sloan, a frequent co-host and planner on the show this year, wrote to Susan and Paul: “I have to say that last night's TTT was an inspiration. It's really got me re-evaluating my teaching.”
The focus of this week’s episode was on social start-ups. Suzie Boss helped us decide who to invite to a show where we were asking to better understand social entrepreneurship. One of the projects that Suzie thought we would want to know about is Cool School Challenge, which, in her description is:
an effort to reduce the carbon footprint of schools. It was launched by Mike Town,
environmental science teacher at Redmond High School in Washington, and partners with Puget Sound Clean Air Agency. Participating schools set CO2 reduction goals, figure out their own strategies to achieve them, and track results (and $$ savings for schools) on their website: www.coolschoolchallenge.org
We caught up with Mike Town while he was traveling. Mike currently lives in Washington DC on a year-long Einstein fellowship with the National Science Foundation, and will return to teaching next year. We ask Mike specific questions about Cool School Challenge, but we also ask him to help us to think about the whole idea of working with students to learn about how social justice issues and entrepreneurship can go together.
Bill Ferriter (One Tweet CAN Change the World) was another able guide in our inquiry on this episode of TTT. We talk to him about his micro-loans club of which he and his students are pretty excited:
One of the projects that I've begun to engage my students in is studying the world through microloans that we are making through Kiva. We've spent the better part of the past 8 months raising money, studying countries, and selecting entrepreneurs that we are willing to
support with loans ranging anywhere from $25-$100. We've even created a Lending Team---called Team Kids Care---designed to encourage other classes to join us in our efforts. (See more on his Microloans wiki page on Digitally Speaking.)
Another social entrepreneur on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers was our colleague from New Orleans, Kyle Meador, who is the Director of Educational Programs at Our School at Blair Grocery. Their "About OSBG" page on their web site summarizes some of the work that Kyle does with Nat Turner (5 Years After Katrina, Teacher Tills Soil of Lower 9th Ward) and others in the Lower Ninth Ward:
Our mission is to create a resource-rich safe space for youth empowerment and sustainable community development.
Currently, we:
Employ 10 neighborhood teenagers in our Growing Growers program,
Operate as the Gulf Coast Growing Power Regional Outreach Training Center,
Operate a Community Supported Agriculture-style market (Our Market)
and a restaurant sales business generating an average of $1,500 weekly
from 1/3 acre of land with our students,
Engage and educate over 700 high school and college service-learners annually, and
Operate an independent alternative school with 5 total students
For listeners who want some background about social entrepreneurship,
Suzie Boss provides a couple of a couple of introductory links:
The
New Heroes is a PBS documentary series (now a few years old) that
profiles social entrepreneurs from around the world. (Full disclosure:
Suzie helped write the classroom materials). Details here:
www.pbs.org/thenewheroes
Youth Venture is the sister organization Ashoka, which has been kind of the mother-ship for nurturing social entrepreneurs worldwide. Youth Venture aims to get teens (and younger students) involved in leading their own sustainable solutions, and offers start-up grants to teams that come up with good ideas: http://www.genv.net/
We hope you too will find inspiration and encouragement from these beacons of social vision and business sense that we were able to have on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers.
Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.
Teaching about the crises in Japan is the focus of this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers. What relevance does the earthquake/ tsunami/ nuclear power catastrophe unfolding in Japan have to our students lives and our curriculum? We suspect that there are many “teachable moments” in the stories coming to us from Japan. But what are they? What are the lessons we might be learning alongside our students?
Many teachers contributed their thoughts and links in the chat (see below), and four guest joined us in the Skype conversation:
To help us answer some of our questions, we invited Dave Mammen
to join us. Dave is an urban planner who has worked on disaster recovery efforts in Kobe, Japan and Aceh, Indonesia. He was a Visiting Professor at the Disaster Prevention Research Institute (DPRI) at Kyoto University and has directed many joint research projects with Japanese government agencies, universities and thinktanks. His research on ten years of recovery efforts in New York after 9/11 will be published later this year in Japanese and English by Fuji Technology Press. Recently Dave answered question on a CNN blog: Lessons from 9/11 will apply to helping earthquake victims in Japan – In the Arena - CNN.com Blogs http://t.co/030uvui.
We were also joined by Martha, a senior where Paul Allison teaches,
East-West School of International Studies. Martha is not shy about her love of all things Japanese, an affection that only grew after she was able to visit Tokyo on a school trip in the summer of 2009. This was the podcast we did with Martha her Japanese teacher and another student upon their return in the summer of 2009: Teachers Teaching Teachers #161 - 07.29.09 - Summer Special: Submitting Your Own Docs Templates, Japan, and Digital Storytelling.
Kim Cofino gave us her perspectives as well. Kim is currently the Technology and Learning Coach at Yokohama International School in Japan.
On her blog, Always Learning, Kim writes, "As in all my previous schools, I enjoy working with my colleagues to design authentic and engaging international projects incorporating social networking, blogs, wikis, and podcasts, and whatever comes next!" On the podcast, Kim talked about how difficult it was to write about this crisis, but she found a way. Kim was able to develop some of her thoughts in a post well worth checking out, Two Crises, Many Connections.
Our fourth guest, Scott Lo also has a few wonderful places where you can continue to hear his perspectives. It's often a treat to check out Scott's Radio Tokyo, especially these days. Scott's plan "is to make the live recordings of these podcasts on Friday evenings on ds106 Radio." We were delighted to learn from Scott on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers as well!
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What are you waiting for? These are limited edition items. Shop now and avoid the rush!
on the show in the hallways of the East-West School of International Studies (East-West) in Flushing, Queens, where Paul Allison teaches English.
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