Gail Desler

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, seven of us--Chris Sloan, Gail Desler, Fred Mindlin, Monika Hardy, Valerie Burton, Scott Shelhardt and Paul Allison--share our ideas, concerns, hopes, dreams, plans and strategies for moving our teaching away from prescribed learning toward a social change that puts students and their passions at the center of work together.

We find ourselves pondering larger pedagogical questions, discussing issues involved in working together, and brainstorming on nitty-gritty issues about how we might take advantage of the resources we have. Many of these questions will inform our conversations in future shows:

• How do we use the connections young people already have--through tools like cell phones and social networks--to extend their learning?
• How do we get to the brilliance within each young person by moving beyond external incentives like grades and badges?
• What's the difference between teaching with/through games and "gamifying" the curriculum?
• How can we build online cultures using sites like Youth Voices where young children, middle school students, older adolescents, and even young adults can work together in an online one-room school house?
• How can we find the hardware and software we need to enable our students to work together?

And finally, we'd love to know what guests you would like us to invite and what topics you would like us to discuss on future shows of Teachers Teaching Teachers as Monika Hardy, Paul Allison and Chris Sloan have evolved into regular hosts on the show. 

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers we are joined by Kevin Hodgson, Charles Freij, Margaret Simon, Judy Jester, Ronnie Burt, Gail Desler, Chris Sloan, Adam Cohen, Dan Polleys. We talk about our plans for the fall and how using Youth Voices might fit with our work with our students.

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, a group of us who are in the process of launching a new version of Youth Voices met to continue the process of building the technology and the pedegogy of our work together.

Youth Voices is a school-based social network that was started in 2003 by a group of National Writing Project teachers. We merged several earlier blogging projects, preferring to bring our students together in one site that would live beyond any particular class, where it would be easier for individual students to connect with other students, comment on each others work, and create multimedia posts for each other. Further we thought it made sense for us to pool our knowledge about curriculum and digital literacies. If being part of such a community makes sense to you, we invite you to join us too. We work to embrace any teacher who is interested to have their students publish online and participate in the give and take of a social network like Youth Voices.

Youth Voices is much more than a website or a social network. It is also a welcoming community of teachers who have been planning curriculum together for many years. In addition to being active members in our local Writing Projects and the National Writing Project, many of us also count ourselves as member of the World Bridges community, and we meet regularly via Skype on a weekly webcast/podcast, Teachers Teaching Teachers, which has been going live every Wednesday evening at EdTechTalk since 2006.

All of this collaboration and talk, these years of building curriculum and working on the web together have led to to consider: What do the Youth Voices/Teachers Teaching Teachers teachers love about this work? And why do we think any kindergarten - college teacher might also find to love there too? What we think you and your students will find on Youth Voices, what we keeps us coming back, what we strive to engender, what we will never give up on (even in a school) is involving our students in “authentic conversation.”

Over the years the teachers who have been working together to grow Youth Voices have learned that as important as it is to have students publish multi-media, well-crafted products, it is at least as important to nurture, guide, and allow time for students to write comments and to develop conversations about each others discussion posts. Our mission at Youth Voices is to be a place online where students from across the nation (and globally, when possible) can engage other young people in conversations about real topics that they see happening in the world. We want our students to be immersed in lively, voiced give-and-take with their peers.

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, and Chris Sloan catch up with two other National Writing Project teachers, Bud Hunt and Gail Desler.

First we talk to Bud about his conversation at this year EduCon 2.3.  We encourage you to follow the links at the bottom of this description from the EduCon site (I hope we did our "linktrubition" correctly here!):

Dr. Remix; or how I learned to stop worrying and love citation
Browse recordings: livestream.com/educon8
Who: Bud Hunt, St. Vrain Valley School District (CO) and Joe Bires, Haddonfield School District (NJ)
Conversation Description:
     This presentation is an extension of a Twitter conversation in response to a keynote presentation at ISTE 2010. One presenter felt that he was witnessing an act of plagiarism, while the other felt he was seeing remix in action. Their constructive disagreement is worth further exploration.
Clearly, there are many differing views on the role of proper use of the work of others. What is the place of citation in the work we are doing with students and others? When should you cite? How? What does a digital citation, or "linktribution" as Alan Levine calls it, look like online?
     Perhaps you never thought about it or perhaps you never considered the issue in its totality. This discussion will raise your awareness of this issue that fundamentally affects us because ideas are at the core of all of our curricula. Through citation, we ask students to connect ideas together and create new ones, but the issue of citation masks the fundamental question of the relationship between ideas and their creators.
Websites:  http://www.budtheteacher.com - http://edtechleadership.com - http://bit.ly/drremix

Next up in the podcast, Gail Desler brings us up to date on here work as a technology integrator in the Elk Grove (CA) Unified School District.  Among other things, Gail describes why she loves Audacity so much, and here's some of how she puts it in her wonderful Edublog, BlogWalker:

     The appeal of  Audacity to students is that they can edit all or just parts of a recording. For the past few months, I’ve had the privilege of observing Teresa Cheung’s 4th graders delve into Audacity to edit their Stories from Heart audio interviews. Once students see how easy it is to zoom in and delete an “er” or “um,” or shorten a pause, or amplify a section that’s too low, or remove background noise, etc., they become active sound editors. I love watching the confidence level of ELLs grow, as they relax, knowing how easy it is to redo words or even a single word until they’re satisfied with the output.
     But more importantly, as Teresa’s students listen, for instance, to Chase’s mother explain how she came to be born by a waterfall, or Devina’s grandmother talk about growing up in Berkeley in the ’50s, or Anthony’s mother talk about her childhood days escaping Laos,  the students take pride in sharing and preserving family stories, cultures, and languages. As the collection builds, so does the celebration of common threads and diversity in Ms. Cheung’s classroom, along with an appreciation for the power of the human voice.

Finally, Paul, Chris, and Susan mull over some of the changes they are planning for Youth Voices. Within days of this post, Bill Fitzgerald and the other "primates" over at FunnyMonkey will have finished a re-launch of Youth Voices on their new Voice Box installation.

The VoiceBox installation profile is designed to simplify the work of groups looking to create or expand their online presence. Groups who could use this site range from media organizations to not-for-profits to schools to advocacy groups. If an organization wants to build a place for their stakeholders to publish, interact, and get more informed, then VoiceBox could support that work.

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

Enjoy our curriculum share from late-September on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers. Chris Sloan, Margaret Simon, Susan Ettenheim, Paul Allison, and Gail Desler welcomed our guest Becky Jezek, the Director of the Wooly School Garden project.

Woolly School Garden from Drew Falkman on Vimeo.

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