Susan_Ettenheim

Except for our colleagues in the the Southern Hemisphere, many of us are either already enjoying the summer holidays or we are looking forward to them coming soon. Teachers often use this time to relax and reflect on their work. We collaborate with other teachers in summer workshops and catch up on professional reading. Summer Invitational Institutes are the heart of the work for National Writing Projects across the country. What a better time to stop and take a look at a new book by Suzie Boss and Jane Krauss? Their book, Reinventing Project Based Learning was published earlier this year, and many of us will be using this book to guide our project planning processes.

To learn more about this "Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age," we asked Suzie Boss and Jane Krauss to join us on this podcast. The magic of doing this live allowed us to also include Chris Lehman, Principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA and Gail Desler, Technology Integration Specialist for Elk Grove Unified School District in Sacramento, CA. and Tech Liaison for the Area 3 Writing Project.

Enjoy the conversation! And don't forget to check out the chat and our FriendFeed room that has many of the links that are mentioned in this podcast.

Chat Log

This podcast begins with a focus on the work of two technology teachers and two students from The Baccalaureate School for Global Education (BSGE) in Astoria, NY. Madeline Brownstone and Shantanu Saha describe their two-year technology curriculum that has students doing global, multimedia projects.

Madeline and Shantanu have been working with schools here in the US through the New York City Writing Project and World Bridges/EdTechTalk. And their students have been participating in a project with a school in the Netherlands with iEarn.

More recently their students have also begun working with teachers and students involved with the Horizon Project, which was founded by Vikki Davis and Julie Lindsay. Listen to hear how these teachers and students integrate these national and international projects with the curricular expectations of a technology concentration that leads to an International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma.

That might be enough, but Madeline and Shantanu and their students also found wonderful ways to relate their work to the collaborative study of rural culture that is being planned by Lee Baber in Virginia and Woody Woodgate in Alaska. Woody tells his students that they are natives of Alaska and the digital worlds.

In this podcast we explore all of these ways of connecting urban, rural, global, and digital youths!

Some educators, including some of us who meet regularly on Teachers Teaching Teachers, have begun to find places in our curriculum for microblogging.

“Compared to regular blogging, microblogging fulfills a need for an even faster mode of communication. By encouraging shorter posts, it lowers users’ requirement of time and thought investment for content generation. This is also one of its main differentiating factors from blogging in general. The second important difference is the frequency of update. On average, a prolific blogger may update her blog once every few days; on the other hand a microblogger may post several updates in a single day.” (Java Akshay, Tim Finin, Xaiodan Song, Bell Tseng, Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communitites. August 12, 2007)

Dave Cormier and Bonnie Stewart joined this show to discuss their project "A Living Archives." As you will hear them explain, this project, which is funded by Canadian Heritage, has students from all three school districts on Prince Edward Island (PEI) using leading edge technologies to bring PEI history and heritage to life. Bonnie and Dave have been building partnerships between the University of Prince Edward Island, the Provincial Archives and Records Office, the PEI Museum and Heritage Foundation, the PEI Library, and the three PEI Boards of Education.

Click Read more to find out what what Dave wrote about "The Living Archives project" in July 2007.

Chat Log