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Chris Sloan

Teachers Teaching Teachers #212 - A community of teachers building "Voices on the Gulf" - 08.04.10


41:26 minutes (9.48 MB)

As you will hear on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we are very excited about the new website, http://voicesonthegulf.org ! On this podcast we are joined by:

We are putting together a team to help us to develop this site — and fast. We've set up the following Community Managers:

David Pulling (Louisiana) - Site Manager
Paul Allison (New York) - Site Manager

Catherine Tibbs (Mississippi) - Art and Humanities
Ellen Steigman (Louisiana) - Art and Humanities
Susan Ettenheim (New York) - Art and Humanities

Paige Baggett (Alabama) - Community and Culture
Suzie Boss (Oregon) - Community and Culture

Jeff Mason (Florida) - Health and Wellness
Andrea Zellner (Michigan) - Health and Wellness

Natasha Whitton (Louisiana) - Money and Careers
Chris Sloan (Utah) - Money and Careers

Alicia Blair (Mississippi) - Nature and the Environment
Matt Montagne (California) - Nature and the Environment

Kyle Meador (Louisiana) - Social Issues and Human Rights
Diana Laufenberg (Pennsylvania) - Social Issues and Human Rights

Stacey Ferguson (Mississippi) - Our Space (K-6)
Margaret Simon (Louisiana) - Our Space (K-6)
Gail Desler (California) -  Our Space (K-6)
Kevin Hodgson (Massachusetts) - Our Space (K-6)

Along with this growing group of National Writing Project teachers, teachers from along the Gulf Coast, teachers in Edutopia’s pblcmp, AND/OR teachers involved with the EdTechTalk/WorldBridges community, we have been organizing (and working with Bill Fitzgerald at FunnyMonkey) to build this site that will do the following:

  1. Provide a place where we can collect, amplify, and engage the poems, stories, and essays that students along the Gulf Coast bring to their teachers this month, as schools open.
  2. Layer these stories, poems, and essays with online sources, including news releases and poetry (such as the poems on Poets for Living Waters).
  3. We don’t know yet! Many of us have been working for some time on building a site like Voices on the Gulf, and we have some idea what directions this will take, AND we want to allow the discussions on the site to help us know how to develop.

The most important item, above is #1 - we are working as fast and hard as possible to get the site out to teachers, and for it to be easy to use. If you would like to add a poem, thought, or anything, please sign up, then once you’ve been made into a member, you’ll see the Add Discussion button. Please go in and write a brief reflection, add  photo, a video, or almost anything — just to see how easy it is to do. AGAIN, THANKS!

Students have been coming back the past couple of weeks in many Gulf Coast schools. A lot of our connections with teachers on the Gulf have happened this summer on a live webcast that we do every Wednesday evening. You may have already been on the show. We would love it if you would come back. We’ve been able to make a lot of invaluable connections. You can see what we mean here: http://edtechtalk.com/teachersteachingteachers

We would love to invite you to join us on Teachers Teaching Teachers every Wednesday at 6:00 p.m. Pacific / 8:00 p.m. Central / 9:00 p.m. Eastern. If you use Skype, please email Paul Allison or Susan Ettenheim and let us know your Skype name (again)— just helps us to know who to look for! We hope that you will be able to join us soon on a Wednesday evening.

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

Teachers Teaching Teachers #206 - Will our students find the oil spill compelling? 3rd in a series - 06.23.10


41:57 minutes (9.6 MB)

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers -- the third in our summer series on the Gulf oil failure -- Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim are joined by Chris Sloan and Andrea Zeller. We talk about building curriculum around the Gulf oil spill and other topics, wondering how to keep student self-motivated inquiry at the center of our work while also introducing topics such as the environment, art history, obesity, AP English, or the earthquake in Haiti and other current events.

  • Chris Sloan teaches at Judge Memorial Catholic High School in Salt Lake City, and he is a member of the Wasatch Range Writing Project. He teaches digital photography, media studies and AP English. Chris, Paul and Susan and their students have been working together on a school-based social network, Youth Voices for the last six years.
     
  • Andrea Zellner has been a frequent guest on TTT this summer, we are delighted to say! Andrea is a former high school teacher in Michigan, who taught both English and Biology. Currently Andrea works for the Red Cedar Writing Project.
     
  • Susan Ettenheim teaches at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in New York City. Susan and Paul have been doing Teachers Teaching Teachers together for almost five years. Susan teaches computer arts, art, and digital photography, and she is the librarian as well. This year Susan is also teaching a Caribbean Art History course for the Virtual High School.
     
  • Paul Allison teaches at the East-West School of International Studies in Flushing, Queens. He is also the Tech Liaison for the New York City Writing Project. Paul teaches English and he started a school/community garden this spring.

We hope you enjoy this conversation between four veteran teachers. Just as we build on each others ideas, we hope you build on ours and let us know what you are thinking in the comments below.

We invite you to join us each Wednesday this summer to listen to teachers from the Gulf and to hear how teachers are planning to bring these issues into their classrooms this fall.

Join us at http://EdTechTalk.com/live at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA Wednesdays / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times

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

Teachers Teaching Teachers #203 - Visualizing information and Envisioning New Schools - 06.02.10


58:46 minutes (13.45 MB)

For this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we asked Suzie Boss to come on to help us have a conversation with:

  • an amazing young high school student who has developed his own project-based learning by creating info-graphics.
  • a dynamic teacher who has been working all year to help open a new public school in East Brooklyn.

We learned a lot, both about visualizing information and about integrating technology into a new, alternative school.

Michael, Amazing Student
Chris Sloan joined us with one of his amazing students, Michael, from Judge Memorial High School in Salt Lake City. Michael has a blog called Graph the Info.

Click on this image to see a recent post where Michael explains his creative process:

Ski-Utah-Graphic-Small.jpg


Charlie, Dynamic Teacher

We were also joined by Charlie Freij a teacher we meet in the New York City Writing Project’s Advanced Summer Institute last year. Charlie has been working this year to create a new school, East Brooklyn Community High School, in Canarsie. And his students have been using Youth Voices.

East Brooklyn Community High School is a small, academically rigorous high school that is committed to preparing students for college, meaningful employment, healthy personal and family relationships and participation in the life of their communities. East Brooklyn Community High School is a transfer school that is designed to help students who have fallen behind in credit accumulation get back on track and earn a high school diploma. East Brooklyn Community HS is a collaboration between the DOE and SCO Family Services; our curriculum and programs build on SCO’s comprehensive range of neighborhood and community based services that sustain families and children. The academic program will utilize innovative and project based instructional strategies that prepare students to pass Regents exams and develop the skills needed for post secondary options.

We hope you enjoy this podcast, and that you will join us each Wednesday this summer as we develop curriculum together that will address the BP Gulf Oil Atrocity.

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

Teachers Teaching Teachers #201 - Horizon Report 2010 K-12 Edition, with Rachel Smith, Alan Levine, and Scott Newcomb - 05.19.10


50:10 minutes (11.48 MB)

Cloud Computing… Collaborative Environments… Game-Based Learning… Mobiles… Augmented Reality… Flexible Displays…

After enjoying and learning from the conversation at Seedlings-2010-05-06 with Lucy Gray and the K12 Horizon Report, we thought we would do a follow-up to their inspiring show. (Thanks Alice, Bob, and Cheryl! And double-thanks to Alice for helping to broadcast this episode.)

2010-K12-Horizon-Cover-320.jpg Our guests for this podcast were Rachel Smith @nimah and Alan Levine @cogdog vice-presidents of the New Media Consortium. They are the principal writers of the 2010 K-12 Edition of the Horizon Report and they joined us on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers.  We supplemented their descriptions with examples from our classrooms. For example, check out the work fourth-grade teacher Scott Newcomb is doing with smartphones in Ohio.

Are you working on the horizons of change? We’d love to hear your story in the comments below.

Rachel Smith's picture Rachel Smith NMC, VP, NMC Services http://www.nmc.org

Rachel S. Smith is the Vice President, NMC Services for the New Media Consortium (NMC), an international consortium of more than 260 world-class universities, colleges, museums, research centers, and technology companies dedicated to using new technologies to inspire, energize, stimulate, and support learning and creative expression. She is recognized for her work in making new technologies approachable for higher education faculty and staff through talks, trainings, and written materials. A specialist in project coordination, user interface design, and visual facilitation, Rachel leads the NMC’s fee-based services units, directs the NMC’s involvement in projects such as the open source Pachyderm project, and directs all NMC internal and external publications. She serves as an interorganizational liaison, bringing together NMC members from around the globe to develop new projects. Rachel authors instructional materials, guides, and monographs on the creative and technical aspects of teaching with technology.

Alan Levine's picture Alan Levine  NMC, Vice President, Community and CTO http://www.nmc.org/


Alan Levine is the Vice President of Community and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the New Media Consortium, where he leads efforts to research and integrate those cool new 2.0, 3.0,… technologies. Before this, he spent 14 years evangelizing technology for the Maricopa Community Colleges, where he hoisted the first web server in the system way back in 1993. Alan was a key contributor to significant efforts such as Ocotillo, a faculty-led initiative that promotes innovation and drives change, created the , a virtual warehouse of innovation that pioneered the use of RSS in syndicating learning object content, and developed Feed2JS, an open source software shared for allowing people to easily incorportate RSS content into web pages. Alan works from home in the tiny town of Strawberry, Arizona, and continues to bark and growl about his work at CogDogBlog.

And that’s not all! We also invited teachers like Scott Newcomb to join us on this webcast to tell stories from your classroom! Examples of teachers looking for change on the horizon:
  • Scott Newcomb, a fourth grade teacher in St. Marys, Ohio.  He and his colleagues have been involved in a Mobile Learning project for the last two years. They have been using smartphones in the classroom.  Every student in their school district from 3rd grade to 6th grade has their own mobile learning device!  They will be adding seventh grade next year.  Their goal is to have a mobile learning device in every students’ hand from 3rd grade to 12th grade! Check out their school’s mobile learning website: http://www.smriders.net/Mobile_Learning/ Next year, they will have over 900 mobile learning devices in their school district!
     
  • You! We invite you to read the K 12 Horizon report and add your examples to the comments for this post.

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

Teachers Teaching Teachers #195 - Spring Curriculum Share - 04.07.10


64:59 minutes (14.87 MB)

It’s Spring in the northern hemisphere. Some of us have five or six, others nine weeks left in the academic year. It’s a great time to try out something new or to reflect on what we tried this year. What are you doing this academic season? Listen to this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, then let us know what you are doing this spring.

  • You will <fill in the blank>
  • Paul Allison and Rachel Smith report on how Evoke is going, perhaps with a student or two.
  • Susan Ettenheim and Chris Sloan talk about how their collaborations in digital photography classes are going.
  • Matt Montagne and a student discuss Goggle Apps and the plans, at the time, for Earth Day, which was a success again this year.

Photo: Uploaded on April 12, 2010 by AnnaBanana628
 

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

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