youth voices

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we talk about important changes (improvements, we hope) that we’ve been making to our Drupal site for students, Youth Voices.  We invited teachers who are using Youth Voices this year. Listen to find out what how they are planning to use this social networking site with their students this coming year.

Youth Voices is much more than a web site. It is a community of teachers, working together to concoct a collaborative curriculum that supports our students in peer-to-peer online discussion. Chris Sloan, Paul Allison, and Susan Ettenheim started working together on this project in 2003. As we begin the 2009-2010 school year, we are excited to invite you and many more teachers into this work.

We are in the process of making several important changes to Youth Voices. Here are a couple:

• Collaborative Curriculum: http://youthvoices.net/curriculum — We’re building it now. Join us!
• The guides http://youthvoices.net/guides have been updated, organized… and there is more work needed here.
• There are now three main ways for students to add Discussions to the site - See under Add a Discussion.

There is more! But that’s probably enough for now. Please enjoy this podcast. It's one of our "staff meeting" podcasts where we make public the planning that used to be done in private. If you are interested, we would love to work with you and your students this year. Just join the site, and let us know.

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

Join three of the facilitators of Youth Voices, Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, and Chris Sloan in a conversation with each other and five other teachers who have recently begun to use the site (or plan to soon):

• Carolyn Stanley, a tech integrator in Conneticut
• Sherry Edwards, an English teacher Washington
• Fred Haas, an English teacher in a school near Boston
• Jennifer Bahle (now Razor), an English teacher in Omaha
• Michael Dodes, a librarian in the Bronx.

As we begin to plan for the coming fall semester, we talk about some of the things that went well, some of our common goals, some things we don't agree with, some new possibilities in our work together.

Listen to this podcast to learn more about what we talk about when we talk about Youth Voices. If you might want to have your students work on this school-based social network, this might be a good way to find out what our community of teachers and students is all about.

These videos also help fill in some of our thinking:

View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

These videos, along with the podcast, and the chat log (below) might whet your appetite for joining us this fall in Youth Voices.

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

Susan Ettenheim and Paul Allison welcome colleagues Ron Link (NYC Writing Project), Gail Desler (Area 3 Writing Project in California), and Fred Hass (Boston Writing Project) for a conversation about collaboration, publishing, and building a responsive community of students, mainly within our work together on Youth Voices.

Please listen to how we talk to each other, then plan to join us in the future.

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

On this podcast, Susan Ettenheim and Chris Sloan welcome five educators from northwestern Pennsylvania (and one from Omaha, Nebraska) into our community of teachers who have students working on Youth Voices. We were joined by:

• Nate Youngblood, a French teacher at Saegertown Junior-Senior High School (SHS), Saegertown, PA
• Louise Rice, a Business Ed teacher at Maplewood Junior-Senior High School, Guys Mills, PA
• Stacey Anderton, 11th grade Language Arts and Journalism teacher at SHS, Saegerton, PA
• Dee Darcangelo, 10th grade Language Arts teacher and Year Book advisor at SHS, Saegerton, PA
• Kyli Sitterley, Technology Services Supervisor, Penncrest School District, northwestern PA, USA
• Jenny M. Bahle, 10th and 11th grade English Teacher, Burke High School, Omaha, NE, USA

Enjoy!

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

Do you work with schools globally? Or want to?

The teachers whose students use Youth Voices -- and meet each week on this webcast -- often talk about “taking it global.” And this is a key value advocated by Jeff Lebow.

The idea for this webcast came when a teacher new to our work together contacted us saying that she was thinking of having her students get involved with both Youth Voices and Taking it Global (TIG). This teacher, Melissa Lynn Pomerantz, a 10 grade English teacher from St. Louis joined us on the show. 

To learn more about TIGed we invited:

• Katherine Walraven; http://profiles.tigweb.org/kagawa - TIG’s Education Program Manager,
  
  We also invited a teacher and a tech integrator who use TIGed:
   
• Mali Bickley; http://profiles.tigweb.org/mbickley
• Suzie Vesper; http://profiles.tigweb.org/suzievesper

Listen to this podcast if you would also like to learn more about Taking It Global. Perhaps like us, you will want to learn how we can broaden our -- and our students -- horizons beyond these United States.

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