48:20 minutes (11.06 MB)

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.

46:37 minutes (10.67 MB) Congratulations to all involved in the National Writing Project’s (NWP) new Digital Is site, which launched the first week of November when we recorded this podcast!

Take a look at all the wonderful work that has been collected and curated so far by NWP teachers from all over the United States at http//digitalis.nwp.org/

Once you’ve checked out those great resources and provocations, listen to the creators, collectors, and curators of this exciting new site on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers.

As Christina Cantrill wirtes:

The National Writing Project’s Digital Is website is a teaching-focused knowledge base exploring digital writing, teaching and learning. It invites participation in developing this knowledge base in several ways – visitors can find a range of teaching-focused collections and resources here related to digital writing, teaching and learning as well as become community members and participate in discussions. Also, after participating and getting a sense of the site, one can write to us and apply to be a resource creator. Resource creators can draft and compose multimodal resources here, get and give feedback to other resource creators, and publish.

Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, and Chris Sloan welcomed five of our friends and colleagues to this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers:

Christina Cantrill who works at the National Writing Project as a Senior Program Associate for the NWP Technology Initiative and Digital Is project

. Bud Hunt, who made this collection on Digital Is: What’s New, or What’s Good: On Writing Connectively.

  Elyse Eidman-Aadahl who directs National Programs and Site Development at the National Writing Project. She also moderates one of our favorite webcasts/podcasts, NWP Radio.

Bill Fitzgerald who runs the Drupal shop, FunnyMonkey. Bill designed Digital Is, and is currently working on an update of Youth Voices.

Kevin Hodgson teaches sixth grade in Southampton, Massachusetts at the William E. Norris Elementary School. He is also the technology liaison with the Western Massachusetts Writing Project. Check out how many different ways Kevin shows up on Digital Is!

We talked with our friends about the importance of commenting. Over the last several years, those of us who have been building Youth Voices have learned how important it is to teach and nurture commenting, not just posting new posts all the time.

Join the excitement! Digital Is promises to be an important touchstone for communities of learners in the National Writing Project and beyond, and we suspect that the quality of the discussions on the site will soon be as important as the quality of the resources.

With this episode of TTT, we celebrate the launch of Digital Is and to think about the role of commenting in building new communities of learning on this site.

Unfortunately the chat log for this podcast is unavailable.

45:46 minutes (10.48 MB)

The series of podcasts about the Gulf oil spill that we started at the beginning of June continues on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers.

We are joined by Alicia Blair a 5th grade science teacher from Mississippi who has been an important voice on many of these podcasts this summer.

It was also a delight to listen to Ann Dobie, author, professor, and former Writing Project Director from Louisiana.

 

Ann Brewster Dobie taught at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette for thirty-eight years, where she is now professor emerita of English. She directed graduate studies in rhetoric and the university’s writing-across-the-curriculum program. She is the author or coauthor of six college writing textbooks and author of numerous articles on literature and composition. She is the editor of Something in Common: Contemporary Louisiana Stories, Uncommonplace: An Anthology of Contemporary Louisiana Poets, and Wide Awake in the Pelican State: Stories by Contemporary Louisiana Writers. Ann received her doctorate in the teaching of writing from Columbia University.

Biography on http://anndobie.com Given our interest to work with teachers in the Gulf to collect the stories of students there, take a look at this description of Ann Dobie’s newest book, Fifty-Eight Days in the Cajundome Shelter, which was published in 2008.

Fifty-Eight Days in the Cajundome Shelter

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed thousands of homes, schools, and businesses across the Gulf Coast and changed the face of southeast Louisiana forever. However, nearly a hundred miles northwest of New Orleans, in Lafayette, Louisiana, a different story was unfolding. As men, women, and children waited on their roofs for rescue, executive director Greg Davis hurried to prepare the Cajundome in Lafayette as an emergency shelter.

The workers and volunteers in the Cajundome provided food, showers, and medical care to more than eighteen thousand evacuees that came to Lafayette. From the first busloads of newly homeless to the disasters caused by Hurricane Rita, “Fifty-Eight Days in the Cajundome Shelter” shares personal accounts of heartache and joy, tragedy and triumph. For the first time, here is a collection of the stories of the volunteers and evacuees. Their heroism, courage, and despair are etched into these stories as they endured the first few weeks in a hurricane-ravaged world.

Retold here is the bravery and leadership of Donald Williams as he took charge and led a convoy of handicapped and elderly to safety. Readers will also be captivated by the unforgettable story of the Prevost family as they climbed their way to the roof of their home and their heartbreaking journey to dry land on I-10. The author includes her own personal accounts of what really happened in the aftermath of Katrina and the bravery and selflessness of countless people who struggled to make a difference.

We are excited about the number of teachers who have joined us this summer for this exploration into how we can be good neighbors with our friends in the Gulf Coast. Al Doyle, a NYC teacher of gaming, joined us from the woods of a summer camp in Maine, and a new teacher Rebecca from Pennsylvania, had some things to say as well.

Some of the things to listen for in this podcast are some of the reasons we have been working with Bill Fitzgerald at FunnyMonkey to build an extension of our Youth Voices site. Two quotes from this podcast help define our mission for Voices on the Gulf:

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I think sometimes when your there at that Ground Zero, if I can borrow that phrase, it's a little overwhelming. But I talked with several people and got together with our [Writing Project] director, and we just had a real brainstorm. And we went back again to our experience with Katrina. What did we end up doing? Not that we ever planned any of these things. It was more the spontaneous improv sort of thing. So we went back and we looked at the things that had been successful, and thought about what we would like to do for the oil spill. This time planning, with the goal being: We want to publish! We would like to do that this time.... This whole experience that we've had this summer in trying to brainstorm how to bring student voices out has really inspired us to take the initiative, instead of waiting until we see it through like we did with the hurricane, to make those efforts.
--Alicia Blair, high school science teacher and member of the Live Oak Writing Project, University of Southern Mississippi, Gulf Coast

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In Louisiana after Katrina and Rita our [Writing Project] sites published any number of anthologies of student writing about those hurricanes, and about what it meant to live through the hurricanes, but even more so, through the clean up and the rebuilding. I have no doubt that that's going to happen again because our teachers always capitalize on those things which are happening in students' lives and their families' lives, and use those as sources of writing and a kind of catharsis. I have no doubt that it will happen.
--Ann Dobie, professor emerita of English, University of Louisiana, director of the Louisiana Writing Project State Network and former director of the National Writing Project of Acadiana

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Also, please read:

• Matt Montagne's Copy of the email I sent to my school about VOG (August 2010)
• Gail Desler's Sample Parent Permission Letter (August 2010)

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