Amy Lewark

TTT#310 Badges-Part 2 Kathryn Godwin, Barry Joseph, Amy Lewark, Samuel Abramovich, Doug Belshaw, Leora Wollner, Myrna Rubel 8.15

We talk about badges again on this episode of +Teachers Teaching Teachers. This is our second show of what promises to be more than a few this fall. On the first TTT about badges and learning goo.gl/97zku, we jumped into an ongoing conversation with educators who are developing a practical, pedagogical discourse between the heckling and the hype around badges.

+Paul Allison @paulallison, +monika hardy @monk51295, +Chris Sloan @csloan hosted, +Peter Rawsthorne @prawsthorne, +Andrea Zellner @AndreaZellner, +Vanessa Gennarelli @VGennarelli, +Elyse Eidman-Aadahl @ElyseEA, +Sheryl Grant @slgrant, +Sunny Lee @threeqube, +dave cormier @davecormier .

There’s only so much that this many thoughtful participants can say in an hour, so we invited everybody back and a few others for this episode of TTT

+Peter Rawsthorne and +Sheryl Grant from the first conversation are joined in this episode by: +Barry Josephgoo.gl/EY6hc, +Doug Belshaw @dajbelshaw– goo.gl/x0x10 and goo.gl/YIued, +Myrna Rubelvimeo.com/41312848, +Samuel Abramovich, +Kathryn Godwin, +Leora Wollner, and +Amy Lewark @fat4thought .

Kathryn Godwin's profile photoBarry Joseph's profile photoAmy Lewark's profile photoSamuel Abramovich's profile photoDoug Belshaw's profile photoLeora Wollner's profile photoSheryl Grant's profile photomonika hardy's profile photoPeter Rawsthorne's profile photo

We welcome you to join us. We’ll continue these conversations about learning and the peril and possibility of badges this fall. We're live at edtechtalk.com/ttt on Wednesdays at 9:00 PM Eastern / 6:00 PM Pacific.

We’ll continue to focus on incorporating badges into K-12 education and beyond. There’s so much to say on the topic. What’s your favorite blog post, video, article, resource about Badges? Please add a couple of links in the comments below. We want to be open and flexile about all of the ways people are talking about the issues involved. And, we are interested in keeping it real. We’ve been developing some ideas around badges for Youth Voices youthvoices.net/play, and there’s more about this on P2PUgoo.gl/oKQ1R.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #264 - A Rizomatic Revolution Blossoms in Colorado - 9.14.11

Tocpic

If you were to create a space where learning would happen the way it does on the Internet, what would it look like? That's what Monika Hardy has been thinking about and doing for the last four years. And now she is working with a group of people to produce a book about their work at the Innovation Lab.

Monika has begun to co-host Teachers Teaching Teachers over the past several weeks. She has modeled listening without an agenda and welcomed many new, inspiring voices to the show. On this episode Monika and her colleagues, Amy Lewark (with her son) and Jodhbir Singh have a conversation about the topics they are writing bout in their "quiet revolution." Please take some time to read the text. They would love comments.

This is what Monika wrote recently on her own learning about learning on Lab Connections:

Previous to the last few years, I have been tinkering with teaching math within the public school system. Alongside, I have been listening to people, kids in particular, but all ages. A common thread, most people often share a sense of stress. They talk about being anxious for the end of the school/work day, or the end of the school/work week, or summer, or graduation, etc.

About 4 years ago, because of my reading so much of Seth Godin, I joined his online Triiibe. It was there that I met up with a small group discussing school. From that group I connected with one person in particular. We spent the next 6 months skyping, practically 24/7. We had so many similar ideas about life, school, stress. It felt like I learned more in that 6 months than I had in the previous years of my life. Whether or not it was more, it was most definitelydifferent. I think I can describe it best as a learning from my soul. It was something I couldn't not do. I was hungry, craving to know more and more. How could we change up the way we spend the hours in our days?

That relationship/learning spurred in me three things in particular, that has been ongoing for the last four years now: a reading frenzy; a revolution of thinking facilitated by twitter; and an intense listening to youth.

Two years ago, kids crafted/designed a four year plan of disruption, while piloting a self-directed math course. [If you're so inclined, see a bird's eye viewof that unfolding, and/or more specifics to that first pilot year of self-directed math.]

We just finished year one of the four year plan (2010-2011). The Innovation Lab was a space within a public highschool, where 50 kids from the district (all ages, but mostly highschool, and mostly the highschool where we were located) came for one or more classes to practice/experiment with self-directed learning per passion, rather than curriculum/standards. We dabbled in game design, portugese, permaculture, homelessness, human trafficking, sign language, hebrew, dog training, neuroscience, pedagogy.

Enjoy!

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

Teachers Teaching Teachers #263 Listening Without Agenda Puts Us in Serious Danger of a 3-Letter Word that Starts w/ "F" 9.7.11

Pericles Group

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.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #262 - Listening to Students and Leaving Stuff Around - 8.31.11

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, Monika Hardy and Paul Allison were joined by Matt Montagne, Alexander Pappas, Chad Sansing Valerie Burton, Amy Lewark, Julie Phelan and Cristian and a couple of other young people. We continued the conversation we started last week, Teachers Teaching Teachers #261 - Monika Hardy and colleagues discuss Lab: a plan of disruption to redefine school - 8.24.11, and we began to look for intersections between the Lab that Monika is facilitating in Loveland, Colorado and our work with Youth Voices, both of which seem to be places where students can peruse other students' passions and pursue their own.

Enjoy!



On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, Monika Hardy and Paul Allison were joined by Matt Montagne, Alexander Pappas, Chad Sansing Valerie Burton, Amy Lewark, Julie Phelan and Cristian and a couple of other young people. We continued the conversation we started last week, Teachers Teaching Teachers #261 - Monika Hardy and colleagues discuss Lab: a plan of disruption to redefine school - 8.24.11, and we began to look for intersections between the Lab ;that Monika is facilitating in Loveland, Colorado and our work with Youth Voices, both of which seem to be places where students can peruse other students' passions and pursue their own.

Enjoy!

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

Teachers Teaching Teachers #261 - Monika Hardy and colleagues discuss Lab: a plan of disruption to redefine school - 8.24.11

Monika Hardy and colleagues introduce Lab Connections

For this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, Monika Hardy @monk51295 invited a few of her colleagues:

  • Thomas Steele-Maley @steelemaley
  • Roberto Greco @rogre
  • Mary Ann Rielly @MaryAnnRielly
  • Amanda Judd @venueX
  • Amy Lewark @fat4thought

to join Chris Sloan @csloan and me @paulallison to introduce why we need lab spaces to disrupt and redefine school (Lab Connections). The goal is to facilitate self-directed learning. Here’s how Monika and others introduce their work in an in-progress book they are writing:

Students in Loveland, CO crafted a four year plan of disruption to redefine school. We are just beginning year two. Year four has community/life as school, with the city as the floor plan. Who, what, when, where, how, and with whom you learn, per choice. The premise… nothing is for everyone. We’re redefining success per individual/community. We’re respectfully questioning everything, especially what public education deems as normal. Imagine if the 7 hours a day we currently call school would/could awaken indispensable people. It’s a quiet revolution.

There has been plenty of theory/research invested in what we are doing, and that will be ongoing. But mostly, we have had the privilege and delight to indulge in experimentation/failure/prototyping/etc. The following is our best attempt to capture the key elements learned from key failures. If you are so inclined, shuffle along with us. It’s a kick. You might just fall in love with it.

For more history of the lab, see this video set/documentation (reverse chronological order):redefineschool.tumblr.com

For current updates/info on the lab, see labconnections: http://labconnections.blogspot.com/p/about.html

This was a first, exploratory conversation, and one that we hope will inspire you to join as well. We'll be continuing our conversations with Monika Hardy and her colleagues in the coming weeks on Teachers Teaching Teachers. Join us every Wednesday at edtechtalk.com/live where you’ll hear and see a Livestream broadcast of our conversation, and be invited to chat and ask questions as well.


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