Susan Ettenheim

Teachers Teaching Teachers #191 - Katherine Schulten and the Learning Network AND "...making the case for the NWP - 03.10.10

n the first half of this weeks episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we had an inspiring conversation with Katherine Schulten editor of The Learning Network at the New York Times.  Our theme for this week's Teachers Teaching Teachers was about increasing teacher voice in public debates. Katherine suggested how we might use The Learning Network for that.

In addition, we were joined by:

  • Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, director of National Programs and Site Development at the National Writing Project, University of California, Berkeley
  • and Andrea Zellner a leader at the Red Cedar Writing Project, Michigan State University's site of the NWP.

Andrea and many others in the chat room during the webcast gave witness to why we want to maintain federal funding for the NWP to continue -- an example of a time when we need to get our voices to be heard!

In the first half of thKS1larger.jpgis weeks episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we had an inspiring conversation with Katherine Schulten editor of The Learning Network at the New York Times.  Our theme for this week's Teachers Teaching Teachers was about increasing teacher voice in public debates. Katherine suggested how we might use The Learning Network for that.

In addition, we were joined by:

  • Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, director of National Programs and Site Development at the National Writing Project, University of California, Berkeley
  • and Andrea Zellner a leader at the Red Cedar Writing Project, Michigan State University's site of the NWP.

Andrea and many o

thers in the chat room during the webcast gave witness to why we want to maintain federal funding for the NWP to continue -- an example of a time wh

en we need to get our voices to be heard! 

"It's been a heady week for teaching and learning discussion on the Times site," writes Katherine Schulten, our first guest on this podcast. One of Katherine's jobs as an editor of the New York Times Learning Network is to moderate the comments that come in on education-related articles.

A Student Opinion post from earlier this week, "Where Do You Stand on Unconcealed Handguns? "received many lively responses from "students 13 and older," who "are invited [to the Learning Network] to comment on questions about issues in the news."

If you just clicked on those links, your head is probably spinning: so many issues so little time! That's what it feels like to have a conversation with Katherine Schulten, who before she became an editor for the Learning Network was a NYC teacher and a consultant for the New York City Writing Project. Katherine was worried that she was talking too much, because she is so excited about managing the Learning Network.

We'll turned Katherine loose, then we interrupted her with a few questions. We think you'l learn a lot about the New York Times Learning Network on this podcast:

Currently, they are offering these features:

  • Lesson Plans — Daily lesson plans based on New York Times content.
  • Student Opinion — News-related questions that invite response from students age 13 and older.
  • Word of the Day — Vocabulary words in the context of recent Times articles.
  • 6 Q’s About the Newss — An activity in which students answer basic questions (Who, What, Where, When, Why and How) about an article.
  • News Quiz — Interactive daily news quizzes on current top stories.
  • Student Crossword — Topical puzzles geared toward teens.

The award-winning Learning Network was created in the fall of 1998. In October 2009, they re-launched it as a Times blog.

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

Teachers Teaching Teachers #189 - Reading and Writing in Kentuckiana: Paul Hankins and student talk about their Ning - 02.24.10

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, you will learn more about RAW INcK: Reading and Writing in Kentuckiana. Our guests were one site’s student managers, Tyler, along with their teacher, Paul W. Hankins, an English Teacher and Creator of RAW INcK. (Another student-manager of the Ning, Jin joined us in the chat room.)

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, you will learn more about RAW INcK: Reading and Writing in Kentuckiana. Our guests were one site’s student managers, Tyler, along with their teacher, Paul W. Hankins, an English Teacher and Creator of RAW INcK. (Another student-manager of the Ning, Jin joined us in the chat room.) Paul is also a teacher-consultant with the Indiana University Southeast Writing Project and a State Representative to ALAN from Indiana. Listen to find out why we are excited to connect up with RAW INcK, “A Reading and Writing Community Hosted by the Juniors of Silver Creek High School [Indiana]. Now hosting members from all across America! Go INcK!”

Learn about how they set up chat sessions with authors like these:

  • Ellen Hopkins, author of Crank, Burned, Impulse, Glass, and Identical.
  • Chris Crutcher. Crutcher’s works include Athletic Shorts, Chinese Handcuffs, Deadline, The Sledding Hill, and King of the Mild Frontier.
  • Kimberly Willis Holt, author of When Zachary Beaver Came to Town, My Louisiana Sky, and a host of other YA titles.

 

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

Teachers Teaching Teachers #186 - Texas in the house with Liz Stephens and Kerry Ballast on doing digital make-overs - 02.10.10

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers we were excited to have a conversation with Liz Stephens and Kerry Ballast about their new book, Using Technology to Improve Adolescent Writing: Digital Make-Overs for Writing Lesson.

Liz Campbell Stephens teaches graduate courses in Educational Technology and is Director of the Office of Educator Preparation at Texas State University-San Marcos. She serves on the National Writing Project’s Board of Directors and was Director of the Central Texas Writing Project for 11 years. She co-authored Technology, Reading, and Language Arts and has written numerous chapters and papers on technology and literacy.  Liz is former high school English teacher and brings that experience to her work as a teacher educator, federal programs director, and consultant. Her research has centered on literacy, technology, and teacher education.

Kerry Ballast

is a Teacher Consultant for the Central Texas Writing Project and a secondary English language arts teacher with 14 years classroom experience. She has worked with students in grades 6-12 to explore various forms of writing, both traditional and digital. Currently, she works for the Texas 

 

 

This podcast is another in a series of Teachers Teaching Teachers shows to feature the authors of a recent outcrop of books on new media and literacy (Copyright Clarity: 184, 135, The Digital Writing Workshop: 172, 171, 170, Teaching the New Writing: 157156, 155, Teaching Writing Using Blogs, Wikis, and other Digital Tools: 138)  Perhaps we have the makings of a new discipline here, or at least a budding new branch on the tree of academic inquiry. See the National Writing Project's list at Teaching Now: Digital Writing Books. What would you add to this list? Let us know by adding a comment below.

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers we were excited to have a conversation with Liz Stephens and Kerry Ballast about their new book, Using Technology to Improve Adolescent Writing: Digital Make-Overs for Writing Lessons.

Stephens and Ballast guide teachers in how to successfully implement technology for writing across the curriculum and create engaging lesson plans. They outline four frames of writing–inside writing, responsive writing, purposeful writing, and social action writing–and present student-centered and inquiry-based reading/writing lessons to connect real-world writing to content area standards. The result is a state-of the-art resource for helping teachers teach every student to write inside and outside of the classroom.

Liz Campbell Stephens teaches graduate courses in Educational Technology and is Director of the Office of Educator Preparation at Texas State University-San Marcos. She serves on the National Writing Project’s Board of Directors and was Director of the Central Texas Writing Project for 11 years. She co-authored Technology, Reading, and Language Arts and has written numerous chapters and papers on technology and literacy.  Liz is former high school English teacher and brings that experience to her work as a teacher educator, federal programs director, and consultant. Her research has centered on literacy, technology, and teacher education.

Kerry Ballast is a Teacher Consultant for the Central Texas Writing Project and a secondary English language arts teacher with 14 years classroom experience. She has worked with students in grades 6-12 to explore various forms of writing, both traditional and digital. Currently, she works for the Texas Education Agency.

We were also joined by English teacher, Joel Malley who teaches at Cheektowaga Central School District, near Buffalo, NY. Joel is also the Tech Liaison for the Western New York Writing Project at Canisius College. Troy Hicks had a couple of things to say as well. Troy is the director of the Chippewa River Writing Project at Central Michigan University.
 

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

Teachers Teaching Teachers #188 - A snow day in NYC gives us a chance to do some collaborative planning - 02.26.10

We welcome you to eavesdrop on this impromptu planning session shared by four New York City public school teachers enjoying a rare snow day in New York City: Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, Madeline Brownstone, and Shantanu Saha.

What you will hear us discussing on this podcast is the beginning of a plan for a research and gaming curriculum and a proposal for a series of three or four professional development sessions this Spring that are focused on some portion of the game-playing and game-building curriculum that Global Kids has developed. We also have a plan for inviting other interested New York City Writing Project teachers to join us by experimenting with gaming themselves and by developing this curriculum with us.

Because of a rare snow day in New York City, four NYC Writing Project teachers used some of our "found time" to do some impromptu thinking together. Our students are using Youth Voices, and recently we agreed to build a new curriculum this Spring.  We got together on Skype today to discuss our budding plans for teaching "I-Search, Diigo, and Gaming."

What you will hear us discussing on this podcast is the beginning of a plan for a research and gaming curriculum and a proposal for a series of three or four professional development sessions this Spring that are focused on some portion of the game-playing and game-building curriculum that Global Kids has developed. We also have a plan for inviting other interested New York City Writing Project teachers to join us by experimenting with gaming themselves and by developing this curriculum with us.

What our small study group, the New York City Writing Project's "Tech Thursdays" group wants to do is to create a curriculum that has modules that can fit into different types of for classes, especially core subject areas. For now we are doing this work in the following content areas:

  • Computer Arts (Susan Ettenheim)
  • English (Paul Allison and Chris Sloan)
  • Technology (Shantanu Saha and Madeline Brownstone)
  • Art (Renee Dryg and David Marini)

We are creating a curriculum that assumes that teachers will be able to commit to doing it two times a week for at least 10 weeks (or similar parameters).

Those  of us working on this curriculum this Spring will build successful collaborative game-based learning experiences for our students and we will learn from our failures. At the same time, we will be constantly building the rationales and the theoretical framework for including a curriculum like this into core classes in grades 6 -12.  We are thinking about how we might involve other New York City Writing Project teachers in this work, perhaps in summer institue that integrates gaming into our current Advanced Summer Institute model. We are also planning for day-long workshops and regular study groups like our Tech Thursday groups in the Fall 2010 and Spring 2011.

We would also welcome your participation! As we say in this podcast, we will be using the What's Up? section of Youth Voices to have our student-gamers become more reflective about gaming, and we'll ask the students to contribute to the knowledge based of serious gaming by developing analyses by adding Discussions to Youth Voices, for example here are Comparative Essays from the first week of our new curriculum. If you have been looking for a way for your students to join Youth Voices, perhaps you could adapt, adopt, and contribut to this curriculum as well. Please join Youth Voices, and let us know!

In the meantime, we welcome you to eavesdrop on this impromptu planning session shared by four New York City public school teachers enjoying a rare snow day in New York City: Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, Madeline Brownstone, and Shantanu Saha.

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

Teachers Teaching Teachers #185 - Did Educon 2.2 Make Us Smarter? - 02.03.10

On this podcast a few of us who attended Educon 2.2 reflect on our learning there. Appropriately enough, we were guided in this reflective conversation by:

On this podcast you'll hear what four teachers, three of us from different Writing Projects, had to say just a few days after ther conference. You'll hear from:

  • Paul Allison, New York City Writing Project
  • Joe Conroy, NWP at Rutgers University Writing Project (Don't miss Joe video, below.)
  • Gail Desler, Area 3 Writing Project in Northern California
  • Dolores Gende, Academic Technology Coordinator and Physics teacher from Dallas, Texas

On this podcast a few of us who attended Educon 2.2 reflect on our learning there. Appropriately enough, we were guided in this reflective conversation by:

On this podcast you'll hear what four teachers, three of us from different Writing Projects, had to say just a few days after ther conference. You'll hear from:

  • Paul Allison, New York City Writing Project
  • Joe Conroy, NWP at Rutgers University Writing Project (Don't miss Joe's video, below.)
  • Gail Desler, Area 3 Writing Project in Northern California
  • Dolores Gende, Academic Technology Coordinator and Physics teacher from Dallas, Texas

If you were at Educon, we hope you'll be able to compare notes with us. If you were not able to make it, perhaps this podcast can suggest why there's so much interest in Educon!

Here's how the organizers of EduCon 2.2 describe the conference:

What is Educon?

EduCon 2.2 is both a conversation and a conference.

And it is not a technology conference. It is an education conference. It is, hopefully, an innovation conference where we can come together, both in person and virtually, to discuss the future of schools. Every session will be an opportunity to discuss and debate ideas — from the very practical to the big dreams.

The Axioms

Guiding Principles of EduCon 2.2

  1. Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members
  2. Our schools must be about co-creating — together with our students — the 21st Century Citizen
  3. Technology must serve pedagogy, not the other way around
  4. Technology must enable students to research, create, communicate and collaborate
  5. Learning can — and must — be networked

Enjoy Joe Conroy's Video!


Watch What is EduCon? in Educational & How-To  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

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

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