68:50 minutes (15.75 MB)
The ice has melted, many are off fishing, and schools have graduated their seniors in the rural areas of Alaska where our guests for this podcast are from. But our colleagues in Alaska have already begun planning for the next academic year, and on this podcast, you can find way to connect with them. In this podcast, we focused on the "Digital Foxfire approach to Placed-based Education" that seems to describe some of the work in the schools in Marshall, Alaska and in the Bering Strait School District (BSSD). Our guides for this conversation were:

• John Concilus, Director of Technology, BSSD
• Ginger Crockett, teacher Brevig Mission, Alaska
• Woody Woodgate, who will soon be working for the State of Alaska's Education and Early Development Department
• Flora Evan, Language Arts teacher, Marshall, Alaska

Listen to the podcast, then connect! Click Read more (below), and see what they are cooking up in the Bering Strait School District. Add your thoughts to their survey, and click Contact. We'll see you there.

Chat Log

45:00 minutes (10.34 MB)

This podcast begins with a focus on the work of two technology teachers and two students from The Baccalaureate School for Global Education (BSGE) in Astoria, NY. Madeline Brownstone and Shantanu Saha describe their two-year technology curriculum that has students doing global, multimedia projects.

Madeline and Shantanu have been working with schools here in the US through the New York City Writing Project and World Bridges/EdTechTalk. And their students have been participating in a project with a school in the Netherlands with iEarn.

More recently their students have also begun working with teachers and students involved with the Horizon Project, which was founded by Vikki Davis and Julie Lindsay. Listen to hear how these teachers and students integrate these national and international projects with the curricular expectations of a technology concentration that leads to an International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma.

That might be enough, but Madeline and Shantanu and their students also found wonderful ways to relate their work to the collaborative study of rural culture that is being planned by Lee Baber in Virginia and Woody Woodgate in Alaska. Woody tells his students that they are natives of Alaska and the digital worlds.

In this podcast we explore all of these ways of connecting urban, rural, global, and digital youths!

45:15 minutes (10.37 MB)

It's happening in small, geographically dispersed schools in rural Alaska. Three people are responsible for doing it for over a million public school students in New York City. An independent school in Milwaukee uses the same software that is being used in NYC to do it. In Colorado, an outspoken opponent of it was recently hired for a district level job, and now he is on a small committee that gives the thumbs up or down. In North Dakota, a secret password is emailed each week to a group of thirty teachers who can then undo it in their schools, when needed. In rural Virginia, a teacher carefully measures her arguments for the educational benefit against the possible risks each time she requests for it to be undone. Because so many schools do it in so many different ways, the developers of VoiceThread have to work overtime to keep their Web 2.0 tool available in public schools.

In September, Wesley Fryer "observed from China that the level of content filtering / censorship enforced by the central, totalitarian government was actually LESS severe than the content filtering enforced in many U.S. public schools" (Content filtering in Communist China versus an Oklahoma school » Moving at the Speed of Creativity).

Really? Do the descriptions in the first paragraph accurately represent the tyranny of filtering in U.S. schools today? Or do teachers have more power than we often exercise? It's become too easy for educators to represent filtering as if it's something that oppresses us. What if we find that the enemy is us?

From the discussion captured on this podcast, we can sketch a much more complicated picture of how filtering really seems to work in U.S. schools. See what we mean by clicking Read more, below.

 

40:00 minutes (9.15 MB)

Listen to seven National Writing Project teachers plan a Spring Blogging curriculum together.

Find out if seven people can plan a curriculum together over skype. These seven teachers from Writing Projects across the country met and planned a 15-week blogging curriculum that they have started to put together (click read more).

• Bob Levin and Gail Desler (Area 3 Writing Project, Sacramento, CA)
• Woody Woodgate (Alaska Writing Project, Marshall, Alaska)
• Bill O'Neal (Trenton, NJ Writing Project)
• Chris Sloan (Wasatch Range Writing Project, Salt Lake City, Utah)
• Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim (New York City Writing Project)

Image Source: Art for the Soul by RICHARD LAZZARA, a Creative Commons image uploaded to Flickr on January 13, 2006.
by shankargallery

 

Chat Log

45:00 minutes (10.31 MB) TTT83 tagged map by user - Tagzania

42:45 minutes (9.8 MB)

Find out what happens when you bring together seven teachers and a student to talk about perennial questions that come up when we use blogs in the classroom.

• a 6th-12th grade "New Journalism" teacher from the Bronx (with laryngitis) (Paul Allison)
• a half-time computer teacher/half-time technology coach from a town west of Chicago, "right about where the corn begins" (Scott Meech)
• a high school art/technology teacher and librarian from New York City (Susan Ettenheim)
• an 8th grade computer technology teacher and Webhead from Virginia (Lee Baber)
• a math/science/employability skills/hunting safety teacher from Alaska (Woody Woodgate)
• a ninth grader from a small town in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia (Victoria)
• an eighth grade science teacher from northern New Hampshire (Rick Biche)
• a middle-school technology integrator from an independent K12 school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Matt Montagne)

 

 

Image: "Stalking a Caribou" by Travis S. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/baggis/1735135201/) License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0

43:45 minutes (10.03 MB)

This is the first of two shows in November in which we are going to sandwich the National Writing Project's Annual Meeting with two special Teachers Teaching Teachers webcasts/podcasts, one before and one after the Annual Meeting: Nov. 15–17,

For this show we invited Writing Project Technology Liaisons who are coming to present in New York City to join us to give us a taste of what will be happening at this vital conference.

Listen to learn what it is that brings us together each year. Learn more about how Writing Project teachers are using digital storytelling (or digital composing) in their classrooms, in summer youth camps, and with other teachers in their local Writing Projects.

Joining Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, Lee Baber, and Woody Woodgate on this week's special Teachers Teaching Teachers were

• John Bishop, Red Clay Writing Project
• Clifford Lee, Bay Area Writing Project
• Bonnie Kaplan, Hudson Valley Writing Project
• Valorie Stokes, Prairie Lands Writing Project
• Paul Oh, National Writing Project

Learn more about the NWP's Annual meeting and these teachers at the Google Notebook that we set up for this webcast.

64:05 minutes (14.65 MB)Early in this podcast we were joined by Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach to share with us some of the big ideas and vision behind the K-12 Online Conference 2007:

Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach, a 20-year educator, has been a classroom teacher, charter school principal, district administrator, and digital learning consultant. She currently serves as an adjunct faculty member teaching graduate and undergraduate preservice teachers at The College of William and Mary (Virginia, USA), where she is also completing her doctorate in educational planning, policy and leadership. In addition, Sheryl is co-leading a statewide 21st Century Skills initiative in the state of Alabama, funded by a major grant from the Microsoft Partners in Learning program. Sheryl blogs at (http://21stcenturylearning.typepad.com/blog/).

K12 Online Conference 2007 | About

In the second half of we get into the nitty-gritty of joining the Personal Learning Space (and Youth Voices)with teachers from four different corners of the United States: Lynne Culp from Los Angeles, Kevin Sandridge from Florida, Donna Bragg from Pennsylvania, and Woody Woodgate from Alaska. Paul Allison, Lee Baber, and Susan Ettenheim had a few ideas as well.

68:30 minutes (15.67 MB)Listen in as the Teachers Teaching Teachers crew continues the work of publishing our students' work in ways that invite other young people to respond.

• Paul Allison, East Bronx Academy for the Future, NYC
• Lee Baber, F. Hillyard Middle School, Broadway, Virginia
• Susan Ettenheim, Eleanor Roosevelt HS, NY, New York
• Bill Oneal, Trenton Central High School, West, Trenton, New Jersey
• Kevin Sandridge, Boone Middle School, Haines City, Florida
• Woody Woodgate, Marshall School, Marshall, Alaska

Here are a couple examples of our students' work: Cultural Identity in Alaska, Sequencing in Florida

67:58 minutes (15.64 MB) On this webcast, we were joined for the first time by Woody Woodgate, an educator from a small town in Alaska. Also joining us were three teachers from California, from north to south: Gail Desler, Matt Makoweski, and Lynne Culp. Moving across the country, we were also joined by Chris Sloan in Utah, Kevin Sandridge in Florida. Lee Baber from Virginia also joined Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim in New York. What did we talk about? Well, we had another planning meeting around this medley of sites:

• YouthVoices.net (grades 9 - 12)
• PersonalLearningSpace.com (grades 4 - 8)
• elggplans.wikispaces.com (common planning)
• youthwiki.wikispaces.com (student galleries of video, images and multimedia)
• YouthBridges.net (webcasting home & podcasting network)

This week we plan to continue the conversation. Please join us at edtechtalk.com at 9:00 Eastern / 6:00 Pacific.