Susan Ettenheim

Teachers Teaching Teachers #120 - The National Writing Project and Google Team Up To Give High School Students a Voice -09.03.08

Paul Allison — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 14:06:31 -0500

On this podcast we talk with four guesrts about Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future, an exciting collaborative project sponsored by the National Writing Project and Google:

Andrew Chang, Product Marketing Manager at Google
Gail Desler, Tech Liaison for the Area 3 Writing Project in Northern California
Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, co-director of the National Writing Project
Paul Oh, the coordinator of the technology liaison program for the National Writing Project

Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future is open to U.S. teachers and mentors working with students ages 13–18. The project requires that the teacher have a parent/guardian permission (PDF) on file for each student prior to publishing their work on the Web and requires that students and teachers have Internet connectivity and use or create a free Google account.

Google accounts allow teachers and students to use Google Docs to compose, collaborate, edit, and share writing through Internet-accessible documents. The Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future website provides a secure way for teachers to publish students' publication-ready writing to a high-profile website intended to feature strong, well-reasoned, and persuasive writing by young people.

Interested teachers should read How to Participate and then register [at http://nwp.org] by September 12. Publishing of student letters and essays occurs through October 30, 2008. Please note, in order to register for this project, you must first have an account on NWPi,

Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future

For the Chart Log, click Read more, below.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #119 - Kicking the tires on a new Drupal site - 08.27.08

Paul Allison — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 15:59:35 -0500

Listen in as we kick the tires on a new Drupal site that we will be using this fall to connect our students. This summer Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim invited Alice Barr, George Mayo, and Chris Sloan to work with Bill Fitzgerald and his colleagues at Funny Monkey to create a Drupal site for Youth Voices. In the weeks to come we will be inviting you to have you join our students as they begin to publish their images, videos, text, and audio on Youth Voices. Please plan to join us.

For the Chat Log click Read more, below

Teachers Teaching Teachers #118 - Interactive Communications and Simulations with Jeff Stanzler - 08.20.08

Paul Allison — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:29:39 -0500

Our guests on this podcast were:

Jeff Stanzler. University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, School of Education, Interactive Communications and Simulations, USA
Kurt Hansen, government teacher, Bishop Hartley High School, Columbus, Ohio, USA
Abbi Gee, English teacher, Da Vinci High School, Jackson, Michigan, USA
Traci Gizzi, social studies teacher, Winston Curchilll High School, Livonia, Michigan, USA

Listen to learn about the web-based simulations and writing projects
hosted by the University of Michigan's Interactive Communications & Simulations group. With the help of university student mentors, students in classrooms around the world are trying to resolve the Arab-Israeli Conflict, or are exploring modern China, or bringing historical figures to life as they debate the world's responsibilities in Darfur. Hear from teachers and a former university student mentor about an array of projects your students can join as soon as this fall, which offer fertile ground for exercising their creative imaginations, writing with a purpose, and sharing their ideas with an engaged audience of peers.

"arab-israeli-conflict-3," uploaded on July 20, 2006 by ManilaRyce

For Chat Log click Read more, below.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #117 - Thinking about Classroom Blogging with Sarah Hurlburt - 08.13.08

Paul Allison — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 12:14:57 -0500

In the midst of planning a re-launch of a school-based social network, Youth Voices, we happened upon a paper that clearly and fairly described the problems many of us face when we blog with students in our classrooms. In her paper in the June 2008 Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT Vol. 4, No. 2), Sarah Hurlburt discusses some of "frustrations and puzzlements" that many of us have had in using classroom blogs over the past several years.

Sarah articulates our reasons for wanting to set up a site like Youth Voices. Many of us have felt the gap between the promise of blogging and the results in our classrooms.

The point at which the instructor feels [classroom blogging] to have failed in some way, is when these individual written elements fail to interconnect – when the social element, upon which instructors place high hopes for a subsequent critical element – fails to materialize.

Defining Tools for a New Learning Space: Writing and Reading Class Blogs

Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim invited Sarah Hurlburt on to our webcast to continue the dialogue about blogging, and we were joined by elementary school teachers, Lisa Parisi and Linda Nitsche.

Enjoy the podcast, and read Sarah Hurlburt's paper.

Also, 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 #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 #114 - Re-thinking Youth Voices - 07.23.08

Paul Allison — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 11:31:09 -0500

Over the past several weeks, Paul Allison, Alice Barr, Susan Ettenheim, George Mayo, and Chris Sloan have been working with Bill Fitzgerald and other primates at Funny Monkey to move two school-based social networks, The Personal Learning Space and Youth Voices to a new Drupal site. Several teachers have been working together on these projects, and some of the curriculum that we have developed together is available here, at http://youthplans.wikispaces.com/curriculum.

On this podcast, recorded a month ago, Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim welcome a student, a teacher, and our lead reaseacher and advisor for these projects:

Hannah Feldman, a junior at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA, USA
Lynn Culp, Northridge Academy, north of Los Angels, CA, USA
Dave Cormier, University of Prince Edward Island, Charlottetown, PE, Canada

We talk about what Youth Voices might become this coming school year.

Much work has been done on this project, and we invite you to join us as we 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 #113 - Just-in-time, just-for-me reading - 07.16.08

Paul Allison — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:59:11 -0500

Listen to a lively conversation about how to use Shelfari-- or how to get a similar site built -- to create a social networking site for students to share their book logs, reviews, and recommendations with each other.

Susan Ettenheim and Paul Allison (and Lee Baber in the chat room) welcomed:

Amanda, the Community Manager at Shelfari
Bill Fitzgerald, our open-source friend and web developer from Funny Monkey
Wesley Fryer, who blogs and podcasts at Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Teachers Teaching Teachers #71 - The Left Coast Joins Us

Paul Allison — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 22:24:57 -0500

On this webcast, we were joined for the first time by Woody Woodgate, an educator from a small town in Alaska. Also joining us were three teachers from California, from north to south: Gail Desler, Matt Makoweski, and Lynne Culp. Moving across the country, we were also joined by Chris Sloan in Utah, Kevin Sandridge in Florida. Lee Baber from Virginia also joined Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim in New York. What did we talk about? Well, we had another planning meeting around this medley of sites:

YouthVoices.net (grades 9 - 12)
PersonalLearningSpace.com (grades 4 - 8)
elggplans.wikispaces.com (common planning)
youthwiki.wikispaces.com (student galleries of video, images and multimedia)
YouthBridges.net (webcasting home & podcasting network)

This week we plan to continue the conversation. Please join us at edtechtalk.com at 9:00 Eastern / 6:00 Pacific.

Chat Log 09.19.07

Teachers Teaching Teachers #70 - Beginning Again

Paul Allison — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 21:27:16 -0500

Six teachers gathered together to discuss the start up of school from laptop rollouts to getting schedules late, from recording introductory podcasts to using four images to represent themsleves, from curriculum to theory, from play to internet safety. Join us next week! These were the teachers on this week's show.

Paul Allison, East Bronx Academy for the Future, NYC
Lee Baber, F. Hillyard Middle School, Broadway, Virginia
Alice Barr, Yarmouth HS, Yarmouth, Maine
Susan Ettenheim, Eleanor Roosevelt HS, NY, New York
Bill Oneal, Trenton Central High School, West, Trenton, New Jersey
Kevin Sandridge, Boone Middle School, Haines City, Florida

tagzaniapaste
TTT70 tagged map - Tagzania

Teachers Teaching Teachers #48 - Hard Questions for Teachers Who Teach Blogging

lee — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 19:01:23 -0500

After a few months of blogging with all of her classes at YouthVoices.net, Susan Ettenheim sent Paul Allison a few questions:

Teachers Teaching Teachers#44 - Connections in Western Massachusetts and Northern California

SusanEttenheim — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 17:06:00 -0500

We were joined on this wide-ranging podcast by 6th grade teacher and Western Mass. Writing Project tech liaison, Kevin Hodgson and Area 3 (California) Writing Project tech liaison Gail Desler, as well as Ken Stein, a high school teacher in New York City who is just beginning to bring his students into YouthVoices.net. We talk about podcasts, blogging, and many other 21st Century literacies. And we are joined by many others, including Alice Mercer, also from Northern California. In the end we welcomed teachers from New York, Massachusetts, California, Virginia, Florida, and Taiwan. We invite you to also join the conversation!

Kevin passed along these links that he mentioned about their Making Connections project (which is closed to the public):

A report about Making Connections blog project

Student Surveys

Teacher Reflections

Teachers Teaching Teachers #42 - What infrastructures do teachers need?

SusanEttenheim — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 16:58:35 -0600

Bud Hunt and two staff members (technology leaders/thinkers/organizers/teachers) from the National Writing Project (NWP), Christina Cantrill and Paul Oh got together with us to discuss questions that Bud had raised on the NWP’s Tech Liaison Listserv.

This was a discussion between Bud Hunt, Christina Cantrill, Paul Oh, and Jeff Lebow–along with Paul Allison, Pat Delaney, Susan Ettenheim, and Lee Baber.

We invite you to listen to the podcast, and also read the collection of voices on this post, dealing with similar questions:

Teachers Teaching Teachers #38: Teaching Blogging

SusanEttenheim — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 17:38:28 -0600

EdTechTalk: Teachers Teaching Teachers #38
Teaching Blogging
January 31, 2007
Download mp3 (52:23, 25 MB)

The night before she started her Spring Semester classes at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in New York City, Susan Ettenheim participated in a dialogue via skype with teachers from four different Writing Projects: Paul Allison (NYC), Matt Makowetski (South Coast, CA), Bill O’Neal (Trenton, NJ), and Bob LeVin (Area 3 in CA). This is a podcast of that conversation.

Along with Chris Sloan in Salt Lake City (Utah WP), the six of us are beginning a complex, exciting collaboration with our students in an elgg, YouthVoices.net. Listen as we plan, take a look at Susan’s introduction to her students, and consider joining us. You might leave a comment here, then go over to YouthVoices and see what all the excitement is about.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #37: Rethinking Journalism with Chris Sloan

SusanEttenheim — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 21:06:01 -0600

EdTechTalk: Teachers Teaching Teachers #37
Rethinking Journalism with Chris Sloan
January 24, 2007
Download mp3 (70:58, 34 MB)

Writing like the post that we’ve copied here makes it easy to listen to what our students think about our work with them. Here’s what a 9th grader in Chris Sloan’s class thinks about blogging at YouthVoices.net:

What makes a good blog post, by Parker at Judge Memorial High School, Salt Lake City

To create a really good blog post, I really think that people need to open up to the readers. Honesty is most effective, because the actual emotion that others put down is probably something that others have experienced, or can relate to. For example, i just read a letter a girl wrote to her father, but he passed away four years ago. It was the most personal, morose, true example of sadness that i have ever read, let alone on youthvoices. I don’t know anything like that personally, but the raw openness made it something that i felt, not just read. I’ve also published some poems on the site, and i’ve gotten some varied, but positive, responses to those, and that’s encouraging. more below

Teachers Teaching Teachers #35 - Midyear Reorientation

SusanEttenheim — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 10:21:26 -0600

Teachers Teaching Teachers #35
January 10, 2007
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This was the kind of conversation that needed more time. Listen as nine teachers from six states — Paul Allison, NY, Lee Baber, VA , Glen Bledsoe, OR, Susan Ettenheim, NY, Kevin Hodgson, MA, Eric Hoefler, VA, Matt Makowetski, CA, Chris Sloan, UT, and Ken Stein, NY (plus a father from China) — who use blogs, discussion boards, and other Web-based communication tools in their classrooms tell stories about the first half of the academic year. We report on what we have been learning about blogging (and using wikis) with students. We also begin to talk about what our plans are for the remainder of the year.

Take a look at our ever expanding Google Notebook for this show: Teachers Teaching Teachers 01.10.07

In the comments at the bottom of this post, please join us with your thoughts about what you’ve learned teaching students to communicate online. What are your stories? Let’s see how many more states — and countries — we can add to the list as we check in with colleagues from all over the globe.

We also want to talk about how to help students who will be ending their classes with us in January can find some closure with their blogs without closing off the possiblities of keeping an ongoing blog.

And please join us next week — and every Wednesday at 9:00 p.m. Eastern — in the text chat room at EdTechTalk.com.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #27 - Blogging as Swarming

admin — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 07:53:42 -0600

Teachers Teaching Teachers #27
November 1, 2006
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How can we sponsor and deepen the natural swarming that happens in student blogs on a social network? This complex question is where several teachers — Paul Allison, Lee Baber, Madeline Brownstone, Susan Ettenheim, Teb Locke, and Chris Sloan — seemed to be at the end of their conversation here. Teb talked about the kinds of committed writing he is seeing in his 3rd - 5th graders blog, their social network, and their wiki. We also talked about the differences from typical school writing that we are seeingthe personal, digital writing students are doing for their peers on blogs in The Personal Learning Space and Youth Voices.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #26 - Is blogging bigger than the sum of its parts?

SusanEttenheim — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 22:03:12 -0600

Teachers Teaching Teachers#26
October 25, 2006
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Has writing really changed? What’s the difference — really — between writing an essay and writing a blog post? Has the use of images really changed the writing process? Digital technologies are great, but don’t we still have to teach kids how to write the way we always did? What’s the difference?

Teachers Teaching Teachers #25 -Do we need a new discipline: Stories of Student Online Conversation

SusanEttenheim — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 08:06:54 -0500

Teachers Teaching Teachers
Do we need a new discipline: Stories of Student Online Conversation
October 18, 2006
Download mp3

Our conversation this evening began innocently enough with Gail Desler, the technology liaison for the Area 3 Writing Project in and around Sacramento, California, describing her work over the past four years with blogging in the classroom. Last year 3 different Writing Projects and 5 schools joined together in a project called “Youth Voices: Coast to Valley.” Given that we have stolen their name, “Youth Voices” in an attempt to broaden our network of schools, we are delighted to include Gail and her teachers in the elgg at http://youthvoices.net! Last night Gail said that some of the same teachers from last year’s work would be joining the new Youth Voices. A great question that Gail has been asking is, “How can we sustain and deepen online conversations on a blog?” And part of this has to do with finding the right balance between personal blogging and common blogging around a theme or text.