A couple of years ago VeloCity asked Katherine von Jan: What key accomplishments are you particularly proud of?
My amazing family. Teaching disabled kids to swim and saving a child's life when I was a life guard in my teens. Taking a hiatus from college and moving to Hawaii on my own at 19. Starting my own company at 20. Creating a mobile humanitarian aid prototype to collect war stories in Kosovo and use them to prosecute war criminals at the Hague. Advising the UN on global communications strategies with the former advisor to Gorbachev. Creating a surprising new path for an industry-leading plastic producer. Being the voice of the culture in executive suites across the globe, and reframing consumers as "becomers".
...Most people who go to college don't graduate. If you gave every student in America a full scholarship to college, most students would fail or drop out. Would any other company stay in business if they failed to serve more than 60% of the market buying their product? ... We put students in the center; seeking to serve today’s students in these modern, complex times. Our work revealed unexpected ideas to help students attain a quality academic degree. We called this work "101 Wacky Ideas for Reinventing College". You can see a glimpse of our findings here on CEOs for Cities website: http://www.ceosforcities.org/101_wacky_ideas
.
“Michigan Tech Lode” is a window through which Jodhbir expresses his “culture shocks and makes newcomers aware of what should and should not be done. And Jodhbir says that he writes for “The Daily Bull,” as a humour writer. I write about the American culture, people, India, language, student lifestyles, pencil, or anything that is now playing on your mind. I write stuff that should not be taken seriously..... like this description!”
In a recent post at YouthKiAwaaz
, Jodhbir writes:
The underlying thing is not to do something extra but to do something different. In a decade of academic inflation when many people are going to college, getting a job is becoming a challenge; it means we should not prepare our students for the future based on present methodologies. We need to bring something new into the system only then we can create a whole new field of competition- like how many companies will be started each year by students at an engineering college.
Lisa Nielsen, an educational technologist for the NYC Department of Education
In addition to her blog (http://TheInnovativeEducator.blogspot.com
), her work is published in “Learning and Leading,” “Tech & Learning,” and ISTE Connect. An outspoken and passionate advocate of innovative education Lisa Nielsen is also covered by local and national media for her views on "Thinking Outside the Ban" and determining ways to harness the power of technology for instruction and providing a voice to educators and students.
When I arrived at Michigan State University freshman orientation, we had to choose our class schedules for the upcoming semester. I was paired with a “summer orientation volunteer,” and we began scheduling my classes. It may have been because I was hung over, but I somehow didn’t notice when she convinced me to take a class that would turn out to be pure hell.
“So, you’ve got four classes so far” she said, “Do you want to schedule one more?”
“Yeah, why not” I said.
“Okay. We could de!nitely plug CSE101 in here on Mondays and Wednesdays at 8:00am.”
“Wait, what?”
“A lot of times, it’s better to get classes like this over with during your first semester, just to get them out of the way.”
“I can’t take it any later?”
“Well if you did, you would have to move the Interpersonal Communications course to another semester, and you said that you really wanted to take that class, right?”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
“I mean you can make an eight a.m. class twice a week, trust me.” Sounding like a veteran on the subject she followed up with, “Anyways, 22 One Page At A Time the other days of the week your earliest class is 10:20am, so you can sleep in on those days.”
“Yeah, you’re right” I said. “It shouldn’t be a problem twice a week.
Holy shit was I wrong.
Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.
On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, Monika Hardy, Chris Sloan and Paul Allison invited Amy Lewark, Mary Ann Reilly, Adam Mackie, and Jodhbir Singh, who has been visiting visiting the Lab that Monika Hardy facilitates. He has a passion to help change education in India where he is from. Monika writes, "We've been corresponding for some time now. This is our first face to face. He's incredible and will have some good insight of what we're doing and how it looks in person."
Mainly, we learned from a group of educators who teach the classics using gaming. We hope you'll enjoy learning more from the Pericles Group.
From their web site:
Kevin Ballestrini teaches Latin and Mythology at the Norwich Free Academy in Connecticut. He has received an M.A. and B.A. in Classics from the University of Colorado and University of Connecticut respectively. In addition to experience teaching in a traditional classroom setting, in the 2010-2011 academic year Kevin deployed the first fully practomimetic introductory language course at the high school level in a section of Latin I. The experience has clearly enhanced student engagement and connection to life and culture in ancient Rome. For 2011-12, he will be expanding the offering of practomimetic courses to the second year of introductory Latin in addition to the first. As an avid technology enthusiast, he maintains his blog, Techna Virumque Cano (http://kevinbal.blogspot.com) where he discusses the intersection of technology and his teaching. He is also a regular contributor to the collaborative blog Play the Past (http://playthepast.org). Kevin is the leader of a large kinship in The Lord of the Rings Online and active in many gaming communities.
Roger Travis is an Associate Professor of Classics in the Department of Literatures, Cultures & Languages of the University of Connecticut. He is also the Director of the Video Games and Human Values Initiative (http://vghvi.org) at UConn, an interdisciplinary online nexus for online courses and scholarly activities like fellowships, symposia, and the initiative’s Proceedings, of which he is the editor. He received his Bachelor’s degree in classics from Harvard College, and his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley before arriving at UConn in 1997. He has published on Homeric epic, Greek tragedy, Greek historiography, the 19th C. British novel, HALO, and the massively-multiplayer online role-playing game He has been President of the Classical Association of New England and of the Classical Association of Connecticut. He writes the blog Living Epic (http://livingepic.org) about his discovery of the fundamental connection between ancient epic and the narrative video game, and is a founder and contributor of the collaborative blog Play the Past(http://playthepast.org). In the 2009-2010 academic year, Roger offered the first courses ever designed entirely as practomimes (seehttp://www.academicimpressions.com/news.php?i=59 for detail).
Stephen Slota is a Ph.D. student in Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut and holds a full-time assistantship with the UConn Two Summers Program under his advisor, Dr. Michael Young. Stephen received both his Bachelor of Science in Molecular & Cellular Biology and Masters in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Connecticut, followed by two years teaching life science at a Title IX Connecticut high school. He has previously served as a professional development specialist in educational technology and now works with Dr. Roger Travis of the UConn Department of Modern and Classical Languages on the effects of game-based learning in high school and college Latin courses. Stephen’s research interests include: gaming and its effects on student engagement and achievement, situated effects of gaming on secondary learners, prosocial learning through massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), the influence of imagination and dreams on situational perception, and pedagogical means of improving student self-efficacy.
Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.
Do you garden with your students? Do they make things? And do they read and write about these experiences, and sometimes publish the results online?
On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, you'll hear National Writing Project teachers from Colorado, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, and California describe the gardens and writing projects they are doing with their students.
One of the guests, Patricia Paugh, recently did a session at the National Writing Project’s Urban Sites Network meeting in Boston.
Adventures in Text Analysis: Reading and Writing a Community Garden Project Mary Moran and Patricia Paugh,
This session investigates theories related to genre pedagogy enacted in a year-long project on community gardening in an urban neighborhood. The session will include analysis of multi-genre texts and sharing of artifacts related to purposeful writing by students who worked with an urban farming collaborative. (Patricia C. Paugh, is an Associate Professor Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Massachusetts Boston.)
We were also joined by an elementary school teacher, Denise Ferrell, who told us about the multiple garden projects she has been doing with Annie Ortiz and other colleagues at the Skyline Elementary in Stillwater, Oklahoma:
We are fortunate at Skyline to have several kinds of gardens. We have a butterfly garden, an 83 ft raised bed, 5 small square raised beds, a cistern, some small dwarf fruit trees. We also have an outdoor classroom.
Fred Mindlin, Associate Director for Technology Integration at the Central California Writing Project, joined us from a Whole Foods store! Fred has been working with gardeners and digital stories and videos, and more as part of the National Writing Project’s Makes project.
Marshall Woody from the Southern Colorado Writing Project who has just starting gardening with his students, was on the call with us as well.
Enjoy!
Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.
More about Scratch! More about gaming. More about social networking. Youth Voices. Voices on the Gulf. And we invited a couple of students too!
This was our fall semester kick off.
On this episode, you'll hear:
Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, and Chris Sloan
Stacey Ferguson, 5th grade teacher in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi
Rafi Santos, a graduate student at Indiana university
Michael, a senior at Chris Sloan's school, Judge Memorial High School
Laura Fay, 8th grade reading and Scratch teacher at Fisher Middle School in Ewing, New Jersey
Tim Kong, a teacher who uses Scratch with his 10-year olds in New Zealand
Kylie Peppler, an Assistant Professor in the Learning Sciences Program at Indiana University, Bloomington.
More about Scratch! More about gaming. More about social networking. Youth Voices. Voices on the Gulf. And we invited a couple of students too!
This was our fall semester kick off.
On this episode, you'll hear:
Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, and Chris Sloan
Stacey Ferguson, 5th grade teacher in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi
Rafi Santos, graduate student at Indiana University
Michael, a senior at Chris Sloan's school, Judge Memorial High School
Laura Fay, 8th grade reading and Scratch teacher at Fisher Middle School in Ewing, New Jersey
Tim Kong, a teacher who uses Scratch with his 10-year olds in New Zealand
Kylie Peppler, an Assistant Professor in the Learning Sciences Program at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Kylie Peppler is an Assistant Professor in the Learning Sciences Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. As an artist by training, Peppler engages in research that focuses on the intersection of the the arts, media, and new technologies. A Dissertation-Year Fellowship from the Spencer Foundation as well as a UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship supported her early work in these areas. Peppler has published numerous journal articles that will or have appeared in E-Learning, Learning, Media and Technology, Teachers College Record, and The Cambridge Journal of Education on the arts, new media, and learning. She also has a recent book titled, The Computer Clubhouse: Constructionism and Creativity in Youth Communities (Teachers College Press, 2009). Peppler is currently a co-PI on two National Science Foundation funded studies on creativity in youth communities as well as a PI on a grant to study the development of systems thinking dispositions through the design of digital arts projects funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.
Do you have your EdTechTalk stuff yet? Did you know there are T-shirts, hats, coffee mugs, buttons, magnets, and tote bags available? They're all based on Wordle interpretations of the EdTechTalk Delicious tags.
What are you waiting for? These are limited edition items. Shop now and avoid the rush!
and sometimes publish the results online?
