55:00 minutes (12.59 MB)

Our guests on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers suggest our topic, or perhaps it would be better to say, our questions. It seemed to us that a teacher from West Virginia, near last year's Massey Mine Disaster, would have something to say to a teacher from Louisiana who lives not far from the BP Oil Spill. And both of these teachers might have something to say to teachers who live near Tokyo, south of TEPCO's damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear-power plant. It has been our goal on Teachers Teaching Teachers to understand these crises through the eyes of our colleagues and their students whose lives are most immediately impacted. Thanks to our guests on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we might better understand how and why it is important to bring these stories to our students.

Here's who joined us on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers:

• April Estep, high school music teacher - @MsEstep, Coalfield Writers/Marshall University Writing Project in West Virginia - @MUWP
• David Pulling, Director of Continuing Education, Louisiana State University, Eunice, Louisiana. David blogs at David Pulling: I Write; Therefore, I AM! and with his students on Voices on the Gulf. He is a member of the National Writing Project of Acadiana.
• Eric Bossieux, @ericattwit, a "change agent" living in Japan for over 30 years. He has begun writing a blog, Crooked Letters, Straight Lines, on his company's website.
• Kim Cofino, @mscofino Technology and Learning Coach at Yokohama International School in Japan. Kim blogs at Always Learning. A wiki that Kim started is quakestories. And, Kim's diigo list.
• April Niemela, ninth grade teacher in Lewiston, Idaho and Co-Director of the Northwest Inland Writing Project. You can also follow @AprilJNiemela.
  
• Laura Kriska, writer of The Accidental Office Lady, Laura is an intercultural consultant, and she just started a website, Cherry Blossom Letters "for American kids here to make art and write letters and then send them in packages to Second Harvest, a nonprofit aid organization in Japan. Second Harvest makes daily trips to the impacted region and will deliver our packages directly to people in shelters."

The introductions are pretty interesting on their own, but we hope you take the time to listen to the entire conversation!

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

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).
• View a slide show that Renee put together.
  

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.

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.