Suzie Boss

TTT#330 Quadblogging 2 with Cliff Manning, David Mitchell, Gail Desler, Linda Yollis, Matt Hardy, Sue Waters, Suzi Boss 1.9.13

We are joined by colleagues from England and Australia on this episode of TTT as we follow-up with them on an earler conversations about blogging in elementary schools: http://edtechtalk.com/node/5156.

Our goal is simple: we want to make plans for elementary school students to find and respond to each others blog posts this spring. Joining us on this episode of TTT are Makewaves’ Cliff Manning, KidBlog’s Matt Hardy, Sue Waters from EduBlogs, and some of us are from Youth Voices. We are also joined by David Mitchell, the Quadblogging guru and Linda Yollis an elementary school teacher in Los Angeles who Quadblogs her own way.

Suzie Boss describes Quadblogging like this in a September 25, 2012 post in Edutopia:

The idea is deceptively simple. Four teachers agree to have their students comment on each other's blogs in an organized fashion. Each week, one of the four gets a turn as the spotlight class. The other three classes visit and leave comments. Over the course of a month, every student's work gets read and commented upon. Along the way, students learn about respectful online communication. They may decide to revise their thinking if a commenter shares a perspective they haven't considered.

On this episode of TTT Paul Allison, @paulallison is joined by Cliff Manning, @cliffmanning, Sue Waters, @suewaters, David Mitchell, @DeputyMitchell, Gail Desler, @gaildesler, Linda Yollis, @lindayollis, Matt Hardy, @hardy101, and Suzie Boss, @suzieboss.

Paul Allison's profile photoCliff Manning's profile photoSue Waters's profile photoDavid Mitchell's profile photoGail Desler's profile photoLinda Yollis's profile photoMatt Hardy's profile photoSuzie Boss's profile photo

On his blog, David Mitchell describes Quadblogging like this:

QuadBlogging is a leg up to an audience for your class/school blog. Over the last 12 months 100,000 pupils have been involved in QuadBlogging from 3000 classes in 40 countries....

A Blog needs an audience to keep it alive for your learners. Too often blogs wither away leaving the learners frustrated and bored. Quadblogging gives your blog a truly authentic and global audience that will visit your blog, leave comments and return on a cycle. Here’s how it works:

You sign up using the form below, shortly after, you will be allocated a Quad four schools/classes including your own. Each Quad has a co-ordinator who is responsible for making sure each of the quad members know what is going on and when. Each week one blog is the focus blog with the other three blogs visiting and commenting during that week. In week two, another school/class blog is the focus with the other three visiting and commenting. This is repeated until each of the classes/schools has had their week in the spotlight. The cycle is then repeated. However, this time, your pupils know what is coming – They will work harder than you have seen them work in order to get content on their blog!

QuadBlogging has been mentioned very highly in recent OfSTED Reports here in the UK and praised for offering opportunities for:“profound impact in developing pupils’ team working, communication and problem-solving skills.”

It’s simple – Give it a try, sign up here.

Enjoy!

TTT#328 K-6 Blogging & Quadblogging w/ Gail Desler, Gail Poulin, Kevin Hodgson, Margaret Simon, Matt Hardy, Suzie Boss 12.19.12

So you want your K-6 students to blog because you want them to have an audience beyond your classroom. What do you do? Do you set up a blog for each student or for your class, perhaps using http://edublogs.org? Do you join us at http://youthvoices.net or do you join http://kidblog.org ? And there are plenty of other choices.

But here's the rub: How do you get your students' posts out there in the world to get responses from K-6 students like them? How can be build a stronger community of elementary school teachers whose students are blogging together?

We would like to invite you to help us consider some of these questions with the amazing educators on this episode of TTT.

participants on TTT328

Gail DeslerGail PoulinKevin HodgsonMargaret SimonMatt HardyPaul AllisonSuzie Boss, and Tony Iannone

Consider QuadBlogging and other complications around having your own class EduBlog or working in a community like Youth Voices or KidBlog, and the problems and delights of having different ages working together, or not?

Gail Desler and Kevin Hodgson started this conversation in November at NCTE and they would like to see if it might not be possible to get something started with NWP elementary school teachers around some sort of community that gets more and more comments flowing.

Here's Gail's recent email that led us to schedule a TTT around this topic:

I would love to head into the New Year with some shared discussions on creating an elementary community of digital kids/digital writers that would lead into YouthVoices, but would actually be its own community. As I mentioned to both of you at NCTE, I'm spurred on by Suzie Boss's (who will be joining us on TTT) recent Edutopia post: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/quad-blogging-technology-classroom-suzie-boss Just seems like a perfect NWP project - that would be pretty easy to initiate and maintain.

That's not all! On Wednesday, January 9, 2013, we plan a follow-up conversation with many of the same people on this episode. Join us at http://edtechtalk.com/ttt on Wednesday, 1.9.13 at 5PM ET/2PM PT/World Times: http://goo.gl/024pD


Click Read more to see the chat that was happening during this live webcast.


 

Teachers Teaching Teachers #251 Pre-ISTE (1 of 2) Suzie Boss (Edutopia) & Christina Cantrill (National Writing Project)- 6.15.11

Enjoy this podcast, recorded 10 days ago, getting ready for ISTE!


Enjoy this podcast, recorded 10 days ago, getting ready for ISTE. What are you looking for there? What are you bringing?

Click Read more to see Christina Cantrill's personal list of some of the events where National Writing Project (WP) teachers will be participating as well as the chat that was happening during this webcast.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #237 - Social Entrepreneurs Mike Town, Bill Ferriter and Kyle Meador, with Suzie Boss - 3.2.11

The day after this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, Chris Sloan, a frequent co-host and planner on the show this year, wrote to Susan and Paul: “I have to say that last night's TTT was an inspiration. It's really got me re-evaluating my teaching.”

The focus of this week’s episode was on social start-ups. Suzie Boss helped us decide who to invite to a show where we were asking to better understand social entrepreneurship. One of the projects that Suzie thought we would want to know about is Cool School Challenge, which, in her description is:
an effort to reduce the carbon footprint of schools. It was launched by Mike Town, environmental science teacher at Redmond High School in Washington, and partners with Puget Sound Clean Air Agency. Participating schools set CO2 reduction goals, figure out their own strategies to achieve them, and track results (and $$ savings for schools) on their website: www.coolschoolchallenge.org

We caught up with Mike Town while he was traveling. Mike currently lives in Washington DC on a year-long Einstein fellowship with the National Science Foundation, and will return to teaching next year. We ask Mike specific questions about Cool School Challenge, but we also ask him to help us to think about the whole idea of working with students to learn about how social justice issues and entrepreneurship can go together.

Bill Ferriter (One Tweet CAN Change the World) was another able guide in our inquiry on this episode of TTT. We talk to him about his microloans club of which he and his students are pretty proud:  
One of the projects that I've begun to engage my students in is studying the world through microloans that we are making through Kiva.  We've spent the better part of the past 8 months raising money, studying countries, and selecting entrepreneurs that we are willing to support with loans ranging anywhere from $25-$100.  We've even created a Lending Team---called Team Kids Care---designed to encourage other classes to join us in our efforts. (See more on his Microloans wiki page on Digitally Speaking.)

Another social entrepreneur on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers was our colleague from New Orleans, Kyle Meador, who is the Director of Educational Programs at Our School at Blair Grocery. Their "About OSBG" page on their web site summarizes some of the work that Kyle does with Nat Turner (5 Years After Katrina, Teacher Tills Soil of Lower 9th Ward) and others in the Lower Ninth Ward:

Our mission is to create a resource-rich safe space for youth empowerment and sustainable community development.
Currently, we:

  • Employ 10 neighborhood teenagers in our Growing Growers program,
  • Operate as the Gulf Coast Growing Power Regional Outreach Training Center,
  • Operate a Community Supported Agriculture-style market (Our Market) and a restaurant sales business generating an average of $1,500 weekly from 1/3 acre of land with our students,
  • Engage and educate over 700 high school and college service-learners annually, and
  • Operate an independent alternative school with 5 total students
For listeners who want some background about social entrepreneurship, Suzie Boss provides a couple of a couple of introductory links:

The New Heroes is a PBS documentary series (now a few years old) that profiles social entrepreneurs from around the world. (Full disclosure: Suzie helped write the classroom materials). Details here: www.pbs.org/thenewheroes

Youth Venture is the sister organization Ashoka, which has been kind of the mothership for nurturing social entrepreneurs worldwide. Youth Venture aims to get teens (and younger students) involved in leading their own sustainable solutions, and offers start-up grants to teams that come up with good ideas: http://www.genv.net/

We hope you too will find inspiration and encouragement from these beacons of social vision and business sense that we were able to have on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers.
The day after this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, Chris Sloan, a frequent co-host and planner on the show this year, wrote to Susan and Paul: “I have to say that last night's TTT was an inspiration. It's really got me re-evaluating my teaching.”

The focus of this week’s episode was on social start-ups. Suzie Boss helped us decide who to invite to a show where we were asking to better understand social entrepreneurship. One of the projects that Suzie thought we would want to know about is Cool School Challenge, which, in her description is:
an effort to reduce the carbon footprint of schools. It was launched by Mike Town, environmental science teacher at Redmond High School in Washington, and partners with Puget Sound Clean Air Agency. Participating schools set CO2 reduction goals, figure out their own strategies to achieve them, and track results (and $$ savings for schools) on their website: www.coolschoolchallenge.org

We caught up with Mike Town while he was traveling. Mike currently lives in Washington DC on a year-long Einstein fellowship with the National Science Foundation, and will return to teaching next year. We ask Mike specific questions about Cool School Challenge, but we also ask him to help us to think about the whole idea of working with students to learn about how social justice issues and entrepreneurship can go together.

Bill Ferriter (One Tweet CAN Change the World) was another able guide in our inquiry on this episode of TTT. We talk to him about his micro-loans club of which he and his students are pretty excited:  
One of the projects that I've begun to engage my students in is studying the world through microloans that we are making through Kiva.  We've spent the better part of the past 8 months raising money, studying countries, and selecting entrepreneurs that we are willing to support with loans ranging anywhere from $25-$100.  We've even created a Lending Team---called Team Kids Care---designed to encourage other classes to join us in our efforts. (See more on his Microloans wiki page on Digitally Speaking.)

Another social entrepreneur on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers was our colleague from New Orleans, Kyle Meador, who is the Director of Educational Programs at Our School at Blair Grocery. Their "About OSBG" page on their web site summarizes some of the work that Kyle does with Nat Turner (5 Years After Katrina, Teacher Tills Soil of Lower 9th Ward) and others in the Lower Ninth Ward:

Our mission is to create a resource-rich safe space for youth empowerment and sustainable community development.
Currently, we:

  • Employ 10 neighborhood teenagers in our Growing Growers program,
  • Operate as the Gulf Coast Growing Power Regional Outreach Training Center,
  • Operate a Community Supported Agriculture-style market (Our Market) and a restaurant sales business generating an average of $1,500 weekly from 1/3 acre of land with our students,
  • Engage and educate over 700 high school and college service-learners annually, and
  • Operate an independent alternative school with 5 total students
For listeners who want some background about social entrepreneurship, Suzie Boss provides a couple of a couple of introductory links:

The New Heroes is a PBS documentary series (now a few years old) that profiles social entrepreneurs from around the world. (Full disclosure: Suzie helped write the classroom materials). Details here: www.pbs.org/thenewheroes

Youth Venture is the sister organization Ashoka, which has been kind of the mother-ship for nurturing social entrepreneurs worldwide. Youth Venture aims to get teens (and younger students) involved in leading their own sustainable solutions, and offers start-up grants to teams that come up with good ideas: http://www.genv.net/

We hope you too will find inspiration and encouragement from these beacons of social vision and business sense that we were able to have on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers.

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

Teachers Teaching Teachers #226 - Diving deeper into currrent events with students fishing around for relevant topics - 11.10.10

This episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers was sparked by a post by Suzie Boss on her Edutopia blog:

When the Deepwater Horizon oil well exploded in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year, teachers across the country recognized an opportunity to bring real-world applications of math and science into their classrooms. Similarly, the rescue of 33 Chilean miners has triggered student discussions about everything from heroism to human biology.

In the wake of such dramatic events, some teachers are eager to do more than host current-events-style conversations. They want to use the news as a launching pad for in-depth student learning. But making that happen requires teachers and students to dive into topics for which there are no texts or guidebooks. What’s more, maintaining student interest can be challenging once the headlines start to fade and media attention shifts to tomorrow’s hot topic.

How do you plan for academically rigorous projects that are “ripped from the headlines”? Here are a few suggestions, along with some timely resources.

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/real-world-projects-news-events-suzie-boss

On this episode, Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, and Chris Sloan spend the hour catching up with their friends:

This episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers was sparked by a post by Suzie Boss on her Edutopia blog:

When the Deepwater Horizon oil well exploded in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year, teachers across the country recognized an opportunity to bring real-world applications of math and science into their classrooms. Similarly, the rescue of 33 Chilean miners has triggered student discussions about everything from heroism to human biology.

In the wake of such dramatic events, some teachers are eager to do more than host current-events-style conversations. They want to use the news as a launching pad for in-depth student learning. But making that happen requires teachers and students to dive into topics for which there are no texts or guidebooks. What’s more, maintaining student interest can be challenging once the headlines start to fade and media attention shifts to tomorrow’s hot topic.

How do you plan for academically rigorous projects that are “ripped from the headlines”? Here are a few suggestions, along with some timely resources.

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/real-world-projects-news-events-suzie-boss

On this episode, Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, and Chris Sloan spend the hour catching up with their friends:

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

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