21st Century Learning #110
September 29, 2009 --
H1N1 Preparedness

After a recenty NYSAIS Professional Development seminar, NYCIST held a meeting discussing H1N1 preparedness.

Alex and arvind discuss what schools are doing to be prepared for closures and high absense rates. 

Resources to find information include Flu.gov, ISTE.

We also discussed the importance of connnectedness of the community.  The importance of creating an online space for students and faculty to continue to keep the community intact.  We asked if Facebook could be that space?

Plus some edtech news from our schools... 
Photo from CDC.Gov

19:06 minutes (8.78 MB)

I am the History Department chair at a public high school in New Jersey
who needs some assistance in regards to policy
considerations when an academic institution runs ELGG. If I can't find an answer soon we will lose our new ELGG.


Our administration is concerned that students can create communities
and exchange materials privately, away from the scrutiny of even the
network administrator. We are not up against a team of entrenched
stone-age recalcitrants, but rather a fear of being in court trying to

 

show notes from February 21, 2007

Ken Stein, Alex Ragone, Susan Ettenheim, Lee Baber

Ken and Alex lead a discussion­ about Flickr in the classroom, digital photography and developing conversation around images.

Some links discussed in the show:

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.

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

Please check this shows Google Notebook for links and additional materials: TTT32. Erick Hoefler and Richard Stohlman joined us to give us updates on their work with blogging and discussion forums in the high schools where they work.

Richard’s work with WordPress and WordPress MU is progressing, and he is looking for other high schools who would like to the students on his student’s blogs, especially Charlie’s Advisory’s New York Experience - 2006/2007.

Eric seems to be in the middle of adding to his technology repertoire. In addition to the committed, rich writing that he is having his students do on forums on a Joomla site, he is moving toward the use of an an elggspaces account in his creative writing classes.

Listen in as we discuss how blogs and discussion forums are folding into other cirricula. Some of the questions have to do with how to get other teachers in our buildings to buy in to these new technologies… and in particular, how to think about the process, less finished nature of blog posts when teachers are feel the need for finished products and projects. We talked about how much time blogging takes to develop. Many other issues came up as well, including how to bridge the gap between MySpace problems (although a student joined us to say that we exaggerate these) and the formal writing instruction found in many of our classrooms. Oh… and research. We plan to talk more about that soon.

Please add your voice!

Teachers Teaching Teachers #29
November 15, 2006
Download mp3

Paul Allison calls in from the airport in Atlanta on the way to Nashville for the annual meeting of The National Writing Project and Susan Ettenheim, Teb Locke, Madeline Brownstone and Lee Baber host a conversation about this week's challenges with students and online communication and collaboration. Sharon Peters shares her first adventures as her students join in the online conversation. Teb shares a very exciting discovery about introducing the mapping projects into the wiki. Here is an example of wiki with an embedded media player: http://theneighborhoodschool.org/wiki/index.php?title=Madison%2C_CT

We had an excellent conversation with Bill Fitzgerald, from FunnyMonkey.com, OpenAcademic.org and the brand spankin new DrupalEd Distribution on how Drupal fits into education. The goal of the show was to create a cookbook for a conference site with Drupal -- we got to it in the last 10 minutes! Thanks to Bill for his time and the excellent conversation.

If you're interested in getting involved in the Drupal Education movement, join the Drupal Documentation Listserv,comment on the DrupalEd Distribution page, and join DrupalEd Drupal.

Past Shows on Drupal, Elgg, and Open Source:

# 11 - Open Source Show
# 17 - The Read/Write Web Conference

Other Drupal Resources:

About Drupal
Drupal Wikipedia Entry
CMS Academy Drupal
Drupal Page at the School Computing Wiki

A discussion with Richard Kassissieh about community portals and open source software. Richard discussed how to build, encourage use, and grow school community web sites.