The National Writing Project and Google Team Up To Give High School Students a Voice - TTT120 - 09.03.08 [59:25m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
On this podcast we talk with four guesrts about Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future, an exciting collaborative project sponsored by the National Writing Project and Google:
Andrew Chang, Product Marketing Manager at Google
Gail Desler, Tech Liaison for the Area 3 Writing Project in Northern California
Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, co-director of the National Writing Project
Paul Oh, the coordinator of the technology liaison program for the National Writing Project
Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future is open to U.S. teachers and mentors working with students ages 13–18. The project requires that the teacher have a parent/guardian permission (PDF) on file for each student prior to publishing their work on the Web and requires that students and teachers have Internet connectivity and use or create a free Google account.
Google accounts allow teachers and students to use Google Docs to compose, collaborate, edit, and share writing through Internet-accessible documents. The Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future website provides a secure way for teachers to publish students’ publication-ready writing to a high-profile website intended to feature strong, well-reasoned, and persuasive writing by young people.
Interested teachers should read How to Participate and then register [at http://nwp.org] by September 12. Publishing of student letters and essays occurs through October 30, 2008. Please note, in order to register for this project, you must first have an account on NWPi,
Listen in as we kick the tires on a new Drupal site that we will be using this fall to connect our students. This summer Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim invited Alice Barr, George Mayo, and Chris Sloan to work with Bill Fitzgerald and his colleagues at Funny Monkey to create a Drupal site for Youth Voices. In the weeks to come we will be inviting you to have you join our students as they begin to publish their images, videos, text, and audio on Youth Voices. Please plan to join us.
Interactive Communications and Simulations with Jeff Stanzler - TTT118 - 08.20.08 [55:05m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
Our guests on this podcast were:
Jeff Stanzler. University of Michigan-Flint and Ann Arbor, School of Education, Interactive Communications and Simulations, USA
Kurt Hansen, government teacher, Bishop Hartley High School, Columbus, Ohio, USA
Abbi Gee, English teacher, Da Vinci High School, Jackson, Michigan, USA
Traci Gizzi, social studies teacher, Winston Curchilll High School, Livonia, Michigan, USA
Listen to learn about the web-based simulations and writing projects
hosted by the University of Michigan’s Interactive Communications & Simulations group. With the help of university student mentors, students in classrooms around the world are trying to resolve the Arab-Israeli Conflict, or are exploring modern China, or bringing historical figures to life as they debate the world’s responsibilities in Darfur. Hear from teachers and a former university student mentor about an array of projects your students can join as soon as this fall, which offer fertile ground for exercising their creative imaginations, writing with a purpose, and sharing their ideas with an engaged audience of peers.
Thinking about Classroom Blogging with Sarah Hurlburt - TTT117 - 08.13.08 [70:55m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
In the midst of planning a re-launch of a school-based social network, Youth Voices, we happened upon a paper that clearly and fairly described the problems many of us face when we blog with students in our classrooms. In her paper in the June 2008 Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT Vol. 4, No. 2), Sarah Hurlburt discusses some of “frustrations and puzzlements” that many of us have had in using classroom blogs over the past several years.
Sarah articulates our reasons for wanting to set up a site like Youth Voices. Many of us have felt the gap between the promise of blogging and the results in our classrooms.
The point at which the instructor feels [classroom blogging] to have failed in some way, is when these individual written elements fail to interconnect – when the social element, upon which instructors place high hopes for a subsequent critical element – fails to materialize.
Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim invited Sarah Hurlburt on to our webcast to continue the dialogue about blogging, and we were joined by elementary school teachers, Lisa Parisi and Linda Nitsche.
Enjoy the podcast, and read Sarah Hurlburt’s paper.
Also, we invite you to help us re-launch http://youthvoices.net on Wednesday, August 27, 2008. Join us, right here at EdTechTalk at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA Wednesdays / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times.
Many of us (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), have already returned or will soon return to school. Our summer weeks of reflecting, learning, dreaming, planning, scheming are behind us. Perhaps it’s useful to remember what our conversations from a few weeks back sounded like.
On this podcast, recorded a few weeks ago, Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim are joined by three other teachers who were just trying to enjoy their summer break:
Allice Barr, a technology integrator at Yarmouth High School, Maine
George Mayo, a middle school teacher and biker from Silver Spring, Maryland
Margare Fiore, an English Teacher with the New School and a member with the New York City Wriitng Project
One of the projects we’ve been working on this summer — and which we discuss in this podcast — is a new Drupal site for http://youthvoices.net. We are planning to launch the new site on our webcast this week.
Over the past several weeks, Paul Allison, Alice Barr, Susan Ettenheim, George Mayo, and Chris Sloan have been working with Bill Fitzgerald and other primates at Funny Monkey to move two school-based social networks, The Personal Learning Space and Youth Voices to a new Drupal site. Several teachers have been working together on these projects, and some of the curriculum that we have developed together is available here, at http://youthplans.wikispaces.com/curriculum.
On this podcast, recorded a month ago, Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim welcome a student, a teacher, and our lead reaseacher and advisor for these projects:
Hannah Feldman, a junior at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA, USA
Lynn Culp, Northridge Academy, north of Los Angels, CA, USA
Dave Cormier, University of Prince Edward Island, Charlottetown, PE, Canada
We talk about what Youth Voices might become this coming school year.
Much work has been done on this project, and we invite you to join us as we re-launch http://youthvoices.net on Wednesday, August 27, 2008. Join us at http://EdTechTalk.com/live at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA Wednesdays / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times
Listen to a lively conversation about how to use Shelfari– or how to get a similar site built — to create a social networking site for students to share their book logs, reviews, and recommendations with each other.
Susan Ettenheim and Paul Allison (and Lee Baber in the chat room) welcomed:
Earlier this summer, Susan Ettenheim began to work with the folks at Shelfari to see about using their social reading site in her school. Wesley Fryer noticed her interest and detailed a quest he has to find or build a social networking site for young readers. He wrote that he
wants “Netflix functionality… the site should offer the following
features:
The website should be free for anyone to register for and use,
but minors should be required to obtain parental consent to comply with
COPPA and other relevant laws as described above.
The site should permit users to RATE books they’ve read, from one to five stars, just like NetFlix.
The
site should let users write book reviews and recommendations that can
be public and/or sent directly to friends, just like NetFlix.
The
site should let users maintain lists of friends, and view what those
friends report they are currently reading, as well as their friends’
recommendations for books to read.
The site should use AI technologies
(or whatever you call the technologies that can do this sort of thing)
to dynamically generate book recommendations for an individual based on
the books s/he has already rated in the system.
Here’s how I’d go about building that site using Drupal.
The main functional requirements:
These requirements are pulled and paraphrased from Wes’ post; any that I have added are italicized.
COPPA compliant — no personal data collected from minors without the prior consent of an adult;
Readers can rate books they have read;
Readers can create lists of friends; these “friendships” can be one way, or reciprocal;
Readers can write reviews on books; these reviews can be shared publicly, or privately between friends;
The site should recommend books to readers based on their likes and dislikes of other books;
Readers should be able to see what their friends are reading, and any reviews/recommendations of their friends;
Readers should be able to keep a reading log on the site; this reading log should have the ability to be public or private;
Readers should be able to form public and private groups/communities.
There are other features that will need attention, of course; for
example, a site like this will require a detail-rich user profile page,
and pages for recent recommendations, featured books, featured readers,
etc.
Lee Baber reflected all the things that make the Edtechtalk community a fantastic place to live and learn. She was fearless, forgiving and giving. She would spend hours trying to help people get to the places they wanted to go, go far beyond what could be expected of any friend or teacher, and do it all with a smile. She was our friend… and we’ll miss her. Please share memories or thoughts of Lee on VoiceThread or by commenting on the EdTechTalk comments page for Lee.
This July, Paul Allison and Julie Conason fascilated a 3-week Writing Project Institute for teachers where we used VoiceThread as the focus of one of our weeks together. In the middle of our work with teachers, we invited Steve Muth, co-founder of VoiceThread, and Colette Cassinelli, a technology teacher near Portland, Oregon who started a wiki that collects examples of VoiceThreads.
What will you find on Collette’s VoiceThread4Education?
Samples submitted by teachers of VoiceThread projects made by their students
VoiceThreads used in professional development
Resources, including other websites that contain VoiceThread examples
Best Practices - tips and ideas of how to best implement VoiceThread in your curriculum
Subject area ideas
“This is your wiki,” Colette writes: “Please feel free to add any ideas, examples or resources to the site and provide appropriate link attribution. If you are not sure how to embed your VoiceThread projects in wikispaces - follow the directions below.”
In addition: Paul and Julie invite you to take a look at the “Narrative Discussions” from our Institute, linked below. We would love your comments on these.
We asked Scott Floyd to sit with some of his friends and colleagues on July, 2, 2008, the last day of the National Education Computing Conference (NECC) in San Antonio, Texas.
Scott Floyd talks about meeting with his ePortfolio mentor, Dr. Helen Barrett. Scott Floyd is a Technology Specialist for the White Oak, Texas Independent School District and he’s the Tech Liaison for the Bluebonnet Writing Project in Texas. (Image snapped by Bud Hunt, uploaded to Scott’s flickr account.)
Christine Voigt, Instructional Technology Specialist at Bishop Dunne Catholic School in Dallas, Texas. Christie talks about a project she did in here school with iPods. (Image from Christine’s Twitter profile.)
Scott Floyd talks with Dean Shareski, a Digital Learning Consultant with the Prairie South School Division in Moose Jaw, SK, Canada. In this podcast, Dean talks about how important it is to find time for teachers to learn how to integrate new technologies into the curriculum. (Paul Wood took this picture during the live webcast. This is also in Scott’s NECC2008 flickr set.)
The National Writing Project and Google Team Up To Give High School Students a Voice - TTT120 - 09.03.08 [59:25m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
collaborative project sponsored by the National Writing Project and Google:
San Antonio, Texas.
