EdTechTalk

Seedlings stumbled together Saturday morning for a teaser! We will see you Thursday evening, 7:30 pm EST, 19:30 GMT for our season premiere  with Audora Svitak, Ben and Ben, Alice, Bob and Cheryl and our most important part of our show, all of you!

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, Steve Muth and Ben Papell founders and on-going co-conspirators at VoiceThread join Susan Ettenheim and Chris Sloan to talk about what’s new at VoiceThread AND how they can imagine VoiceThread supporting our efforts with http://voicesonthegulf.org.

In addition, Bill Ferriter, a sixth grade science teacher in North Carolina, joins us. Bill has just published a great book, Teaching the iGeneration. There are a lot great ideas in this new book, but there’s one that is perfect for a VoiceThread discussion: Collaborative vs. Competitive dialogue. In an email, Bill writes:

Collaborative and competitive dialogue is something I talk about in Teaching the iGeneration and something that VoiceThread facilitates nicely.  We could talk about how our world emphasizes competitive dialogue—-kids are surrounded by marketing messages and celebrities and politicians screaming for attention and unwilling to listen to other viewpoints——but collaborative dialogue is essential for solving the kinds of global, cross-border challenges our world is facing. 

Alicia Blair, a colleague and science teacher at an alternative school in Mississippi, and Gail Desler, who works with teachers in Northern California, join us as well. Alicia and Gail have been helping us to keep it real all summer.

Enjoy!

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

Time to put a little fun into online learning--with good reason: 'Emotional arousal helps the brain learn'. Medina, Brain Rules (2008). Joni Dunlap leads the IDLive team in considering how to incorporate fun into the fabric of a course to provide a more stimulating learning experience.

Zuochen Zhang, Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Windsor University, and Richard F. Kenny, Associate Professor at the Center for Distance Education, Athabasca University, joined us this week to discuss the perspectives of International students in online courses.