On this week’s Teachers Teaching Teachers, we had some follow-up’s, and some room for new voices. Paul Allison invited several of his students from the East-West School of International Studies in Flushing, NY onto the show to explain more about gaming. These students were listening and in the chat room on TTT#181 the week before when we talked about gaming in schools with other teachers, researchers, and consultants. The student had asked for a student-centered follow up. Listen to find out where gaming is in their lives.

And stay tuned every Wednesday evening this Spring as Paul and Susan Ettenheim and other students learn about bringing gaming into their curriculum this coming semester. If you know of a gamer, please invite him or her to join us as well! We’d love to include other students via Skype!

And if that’s not enough, this week's podcast also includes George Haines, a 6th grade teacher back on the show to talk about a Twitter project he was about to launch. George was on TTT in August: Teachers Teaching Teachers #165 - 08.26.09 - Meet Lisa Dick and George Haines: Talking about research and diigo George has written us recently to say that he hasn’t given up on “video and self-directed learning via youtube."

I haven’t scrapped that platform yet, but I decided to try to use Twitter for self-directed learning first. It is so much more nimble of a platform, I figured it would allow for a more fluid discussion and more immediate feedback and clarification.I saw that you have a youthvoices account on twitter and I just started following it. My kids are almost ready to start tweeting out their questions and connecting to other kids as part of this “KidSourcing” project. My kids are 6th graders, but I have invited any classes in the ballpark to connect with my kids. We are connecting to kids in Tanzania (http://epicchangeblog.org/2009/10/21/the-twitterkids-of-tanzania/) and I am working out the involvement with schools in Peru, Brazil, China and a couple here in the old U.S. of A. I don’t know how neatly our project meshes with what you are trying to accomplish with Youth Voices, but I figured I would reach out and gauge  your interest in connecting.Here is the basic outline for the project: The idea is to have kids search for answers from the crowd of kids with no help from the adults (aside from monitoring and guiding offline).

The idea is to seek answers to “why” questions as opposed to “What” questions. For example, a question that a kid can simply Google like “when did the civil war start?” is a bad one, but a question like “WHY did the civil war start?” is a good one. Questions that start discussions, lead to independent research and sharing links fit the bill. The idea would be to keep it loose and low impact- not a heavily dependent collaboration. I will probably tell my kids to post a new question each week and I will probably give them an arbitrary number of questions from other kids to help answer.

For the first month we will work in depth on the project, then I hope to make it part of the routine when they come to the lab, meaning they login and check twitter for 5-10 minutes before we launch into whatever other projects we are doing at the time. video and self-directed learning via youtube.I haven’t scrapped that platform yet, but I decided to try to use Twitter for self-directed learning first. It is so much more nimble of a platform, I figured it would allow for a more fluid discussion and more immediate feedback and clarification.I saw that you have a Youth Voices account on twitter and I just started following it. My kids are almost ready to start tweeting out their questions and connecting to other kids as part of this “KidSourcing” project. My kids are 6th graders, but I have invited any classes in the ballpark to connect with my kids. We are connecting to kids in Tanzania (http://epicchangeblog.org/2009/10/21/the-twitterkids-of-tanzania/) and I am working out the involvement with schools in Peru, Brazil, China and a couple here in the old U.S. of A. I don’t know how neatly our project meshes with what you are trying to accomplish with youthvoices, but I figured I would reach out and gauge  your interest in connecting.

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

"We squeezed three shows into one," Peggy George said in the chat room toward the end of the webcast. It's a summer special!

At the beginning of this podcast [0:44 - 18:52] Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim talk to three Google managers and engineers about a new Docs feature: being able to upload our own templates. We were joined by:

• Ronald Ho, a Google Docs Product Manager
• Michael Thomas and Valerie Blechar, Google Docs Templates Engineers

Next up [18:53 - 29:29] are three people from The East-West School of International Studies (EWSIS), Ben Sherman, Principal. Paul Allison teaches English at EWSIS, and he is joined in the second part of this podcast by his colleague and two students who had just returned from a 10-day visit to Japan which was sponsored by Women Welcome Women World Wide:

• David Bantz, Japanese Language teacher at EWSIS
• Martha and Kwaku, Juniors at EWSIS

Finally we find some (although not nearly enough) time [29:30 - 36:21] to talk with Larry Newberger, Tech Liaison for the Ozarks Writing Project (OWP). Larry was excited to report on a 5-day OWP Advanced Institute on Digital Storytelling, "Trachers Traversing the Technology Highway," that he had just finished. Don't miss their teachers' Digital Stories and VoiceThreads.

Find more videos like this on OWP Advanced Institute

On November 4th, Katie, a senior at the Judge Memorial Catholic High School in Salt Lake City, Utah, and her mother "coincidentally" found themselves in Chicago.

Yes, Chicago. I was there (coincidentally) on election day - November 4, 2008. This wasn't just any election in any city, though. This was THE election in THE city. It was the election that will forever make history. Obama was elected the first African-American president of the United States and I was there at Grant Park where he gave his acceptance speech. It was truly one of the most moving experiences of my life.

YES WE CAN: my experience in Grant Park on election day

When Katie got home she posted her reflections on this event on Youth Voices, a social network for students that her teacher, Chris Sloan helps to maintain. The joy in Katie's writing and in her image that she inserted with her text captured that important moment for the hundreds of other students who post their work on Youth Voices.

"I saw so many people whose faces expressed a relief that some glimmer of hope had finally come that, in fact, a black man could conquer a still very racist nation." Katie wrote in her post. "At that moment in time, our country seemed to get a little bit more accepting, and this was making people uncontrollably happy."

A Latina from Flushing, New York didn't share Katie's enthusiasm. In fact, for Dominique, an 11th grader at the East-West School for International Studies, something in what Katie had written brought to a head something that had been bothering her about the way people were
talking about Obama:

Another sentence that I found wrong and stirred up some anger is "a black man could conquer a still very racist country."  It's honestly comical. If this was " a still very racist  country " then trust me Obama would have not become President. Let me give you some valuable insight. Without the support of the Hispanic population and Caucasian population, there would be no (according to you) "First African-American President ". You believe this country is racist, but you don't realize that this country is racist because of people who exploit a certain race and make it seem that they on top of everyone else.

Incomplete

On the weekend after Dominique's comment, Chris Sloan contacted Dominique's teacher, Paul Allison, and Chris and Paul decided that it might be interesting to invite Katie and Dominique, along with another student, Farisa, to get together on Teachers Teaching Teachers to talk things over.

That's where this show begins.

In addition the students were joined by Elizabeth Berryman, Director of the PBS Teacher Center in Virginia. Elizabeth provided some follow up to a project that Susan Ettenheim's students at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in New York City participated in. We had talked with Elizbeth in an earlier show about the Video the Vote,a partnership between PBS and YouTube. On this show Elizabeth and Susan talk about how students and teachers took to this project, and Elizabeth begins to decribe the next project in which students will be invited to video the human impact of the economic crisis that we face.

Enjoy! And consider sharing this one with your students.