Join us, as we talk about elementary student blogging with our guest Jan Smith, a sixth grade teachers in British Columbia, Huzzah! http://huzzah.edublogs.org/  She started with a strictly controled class blog, but found that it lacked conversational give and take.  She started again with an edublogs account, and this time she encouraged a more "conversational" approach both in student's writing, giving them a voice, and how they interacted with each other.  She started a practice of "gradual release" giving students more authority, and control over their blogging and blogs as they showed responsibility until many had earned their own blogs and were self-moderated.  She also shared how she dealt with problems and conflicts when they came up, respecting students, and making them responsible. 

Link to Text Chat.

This is the second of two shows we've done recently that featured young high school women. On TTT#152 we enjoyed learning from the young women at Matt Montagne's school who are involved with tthe Gator Radio Experience.

On this podcast, we feature three amazing teenagers, three glib feminists who have begun to make their voices be heard on a group blog, "Womens Glib."

File this one under student self-initiated work that gives you hope for the future — and the present too!

The young women who started a feminist blog recently to join us on Teachers Teaching Teachers. We learned so much from them that we can't wait until we play this for our students in this fall when we introduce them to blogging.

Women’s Glib is a community of nerdy, foul-mouthed youth. Miranda started the adventure in January, after many months spent wondering if she was up to the task of maintaining a blog. She was very quickly joined by Katie, Ruth, Zoe, Phoebe, Shira, Silvia, and Kyla. Guest contributors also help spread the feministy love now and then.

Here’s what they say on their about page:

Women’s Lib[eration], a.k.a. feminism: n., belief in the social, political, and economic equality of all people regardless of gender or sex

glib: adj., performed with a natural, offhand ease

Women’s Glib is a blog by and for young feminists and womanists. Contributors are teenage New Yorkers, writing about what matters to us with a focus on feminism and other progressive values. We cannot and do not speak for all teenagers or all young feminists; we simply speak for ourselves and write our own truths.

Listen to the podcast and be inspired with us by this new generation of feminist bloggers.

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

Sheri Edwards and Matt Montagne joined Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim on this podcast.

Sheri has been teaching for decades at the Nespelem School, a public school located on the Colville Indian Reservation in Nespelem in the state of Washington, USA. They have 139 students in grades preschool through grade eight.

Sheri is involved in so much that her remarks in this podcast can only be considered an brief introduction to the rich resource that can be found in her work.

We are delighted that some of her students have begun to publish in Youth Voices. For example, west31 writes: "I think wrestling is very competitive and fun because you get to flop people around, show your skills an quickness. Also you don't always use your strength for wrestling, you use smarts against your opponents.

If you're an English teacher or a photography or media teacher, wondering if or when to introduce your students to Youth Voices, this might be the podcast for you.

Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim were joined this week by their colleague of many years, Chris Sloan, who teaches English, media and photography at Judge Memorial Catholic High School in Salt Lake City Utah.

Paul, Susan and Chris introduced their work with students and each other to Ron Link, a English and video teacher in the Bronx, who has recently begun to work with the New York City Writing Project, and with Fred Haas, the Technology Liaison for the Boston Writing Project, and teacher of English and screenwriting.

There is so much more for us to learn from each other. Listen to this podcast, then Join us!

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

Richard Beach, Liz Boesler, and Candance Doerr-Stevens were our guests on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers:

• Richard Beach is a professor of English education at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches and conducts research on media literacy methods, digital writing and identity construction. Richard recently published a new book, Teaching Writing Using Blogs, Wikis, and other Digital Tools
  
• Elizabeth (“Liz”) Boeser is an English/language arts teacher, Jefferson High School, Bloomington, MN, a teacher featured in Teaching Writing Using Blogs, Wikis, and other Digital Tools who conducted the online role-play activities.
• Candance Doerr-Stevens is a former English teacher, and current graduate student at the University of Minnesota. Candance is also a staff member at the Minnesota Writing Project, and she is studying online role-play with Richard.

Want more? Here are several more links about our guests:

• Liz Boeser’s current Spring, 2009 courses
• Examples of the online role-play:
  • University of North Dakota Fighting Sioux mascot debate (used with Montana, 1948): http://roleplaymascots.blogspot.com and http://mascotroleplay.blogspot.com/
• Resource wiki created for Montana, 1948: http://jhscollegewritingmontana.pbwiki.com/
• Censorship role-play http://schooledthewriteway.blogspot.com/
• NCTE 2008 presentation, San Antonio  VoiceThread: http://voicethread.com/#u11815.b338247.i1791441
• K-12 Online Conference 2008 presentation http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=326

Please enjoy the podcast.

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

Chat:

A lively show with guest Kathy Cassidy, blogger-elementary teacher extraordinaire!

In the midst of planning a re-launch of a school-based social network, Youth Voices, we happened upon a paper that clearly and fairly described the problems many of us face when we blog with students in our classrooms. In her paper in the June 2008 Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT Vol. 4, No. 2), Sarah Hurlburt discusses some of "frustrations and puzzlements" that many of us have had in using classroom blogs over the past several years.

Sarah articulates our reasons for wanting to set up a site like Youth Voices. Many of us have felt the gap between the promise of blogging and the results in our classrooms.

The point at which the instructor feels [classroom blogging] to have failed in some way, is when these individual written elements fail to interconnect – when the social element, upon which instructors place high hopes for a subsequent critical element – fails to materialize.

Defining Tools for a New Learning Space: Writing and Reading Class Blogs

Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim invited Sarah Hurlburt on to our webcast to continue the dialogue about blogging, and we were joined by elementary school teachers, Lisa Parisi and Linda Nitsche.

Enjoy the podcast, and read Sarah Hurlburt's paper.

Also, we invite you to help us re-launch http://youthvoices.net on Wednesday, August 27, 2008. Join us, right here at EdTechTalk at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA Wednesdays / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times.

For the Chat Log, click Read more, below.

For this webcast, we invited Bill Fitzgerald, Dave Cormier and Gail Desler to talk about social networking and what platforms make sense right now. Of course behind all of this talk about Drupal and Edublogs were questions that we are asking about about how we in the, ah... Teachers Teaching Teachers, Youth Voices, Personal Learning Space, Youth Twitter ... group of teachers might want to continue working together ... and how the software decisions we need to make this Spring can support our hopes and plans.