Paul Allison :: Feeds

Setting the table

It feels far away, because I've got to get computers set up -- and connected to the Internet -- and I keep running into problems like Skype not working because of something the Department of Education put on the computers.... I can get it off, but doing that thirty times becomes a pain. Still, I feel clear about what I want the students to have available, and how to get them started, but I need to figure out how the students can do parts of this set up -- while still being accurate.

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Interactive Communications and Simulations with Jeff Stanzler - TTT118 - 08.20.08

Download Interactive Communications and Simulations with Jeff Stanzler - TTT118 - 08.20.08 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 [...]

Thinking about Classroom Blogging with Sarah Hurlburt - TTT117 - 08.13.08

Download Thinking about Classroom Blogging with Sarah Hurlburt - TTT117 - 08.13.08 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 [...]

Protest or Acting Irresponsibly?

Link to audio

Today is one of several days out of the year when teachers are proctoring tests -- assessments that determine our school grade. This is so Orwellian that I don't know where to start to protest, so I just keep saying "No!" I don't do this loudly or even explicitly. My negative opinion about the testing-mandated-curriculum culture just seems to ooze out of me. Mainly I teach new things to students like blogging and podcasting and -- like now -- I'm setting up for a webcast tomorrow, instead of proctoring for a test. Unfortunately my attitude and teaching can't last long in a school, so I guess I need to be ready to keep looking again and again. Why can't I find a school that might be willing to re-think curriculum in such a way that computers are necessary to do the tasks we imagine for young people?

Profile, Posting, Responding

I've been trying to describe my curriculum in simpler and simpler ways. Recently I've been saying that there are three strands:

* Blog Posts - responding to literature and journal-writing/research
* Profile building - description of self, community, and culture using multimedia
* Responding to others in the Personal Learning Space, a school based social network.

Of course there are a lot of other goals, and I'm concerned that my students are following me.

Imagining a New Chapter - TTT115 - 07.30.08

Download Imagining a New Chapter - TTT115 - 07.30.08 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 [...]

What's your philosophy?

A bit of a rant about teaching philosophy and change in how we do school. Recorded on Tue Jul 31 10:47:31 MST 2007

Tech Matters`07 Introductions

This is our first dinner together. We introduced ourselves.

Tech Matters`07 Compelling Communication

The first full day of workshops at the National Writing Project's Tech Matters`07 Institute in Chico, California

Collaboration

Betty Collum and Troy Hicks present at Tech Matters 07.

Rich Interactive Informaton

Technology Matters, second day.

Building community for Youth Voices - vcast 07.27.07

I want to build on our first attempts to have students use Google Reader to do research for their blog posts. Last semester, Susan Ettenheim and Chris Sloan joined me by having our students use Google Reader in our classroom as part of a more general blogging project connected to Youth Voices. We found that students' posts were often more compelling when they "introduced, inserted, and interpreted" quotations from other sources, especially blogs and news sources that their students found by searching Google Blog Search and Google News. I also had students quote from podcasts, albeit ones that he had selected for them and with no particular topic or question in mind.

Here are some examples from last semester of Youth Voices bloggers using published voices from blogs and news items in their own blog posts:

• My students at East Side Community High School, NYC: Jennifer, Felix, John (podcast listener)
• Susan's students at Eleanor Roosevelt High School, NYC: Robyn, Mercedes, Christina
• Chris's students at Judge Memorial High School, Salt Lake City, Utah: Ameera, Eric's China post, Emerson's myspace

I think there are two main habits and several understandings that we are want students to develop by learning to use Google Reader.

1. Students will use Google Reader to collect and read online sources about self-directed inquiries.
2. Students will include voices from the sources they collect in Google Reader when they post on their blogs.

Understandings:

• Students will begin to use common "texts" with students in their niche group of friends or "elgg communities" using the Google Reader Share function.
• Students will assess their own reading habits, using the Google Reader Trends function.
• Students will understand the differences between blogs, news sources, articles, peer-reviewed journals, videos, and podcasts.
• Students will distinguish between the RSS-resources (listed above) from web sites, Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias and information sources.

See more of my thinking about this at this wiki page: Using Google Reader.

Adding Freire to Beane: Videocast 08.02.07

Take James Beane's "10 self and 10 world questions." (See this Trailfire for more information.) Mix in a healthy dose of Paulo Freire's "generative words" and "generative themes." (See a description of "generative themes that discusses images in a book, Brave New Schools. And find "generative" in the third chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed.) And I think we've got the makings of a really powerful curriculum! I'm planning to write more about this soon. Maybe I can make it sound coherent?

Tech Matters 07 Minigrant Develoment

Saturday, July 21, 2007 in Chico, California.

Swimmiing at Tech Matters`07

Yes, they spelled out W-I-K-I in the water.

Databases and Research

The issue is, of course, complicated. The only way to keep this information locked and expensive is to claim that it is special, but I still need that to be demonstrated. Is it really true that the information in these databases is significantly more complex, thorough, considered than can be found elsewhere? What about http://FindArticles.com? Also, we need to consider how much an adolescent can comprehend in evaluating resources. I like the direction Susan Ettenheim was taking at the end of Teachers Teaching Teachers #66, where she tried to get folks to describe what it is in these databases that is unique. Oddly the response was a story about how someone (from Georgia?) had started calling them empty containers. Freeing the databases is important, but getting rich statistics, peer-evaluated articles... (and this is the list that I think needs to be developed) ... to our students is even more important, and may or or may not be related to the "free the databases" movement.

Coast Guard Beach, Eastham, MA

The Atlantic Ocean has a way of quieting everything else.

Is blogging dialectical note taking? Videocast 08.09.07

At the beginning of my first year of teaching in September 1984, I read Ann E. Berthoff's five-paragraph "Facets" in the English Journal. The "dialectical or double-entry notebook" that she describes became an important tool in my classroom that year, and it has has remained so since, especially in the last few years as blogging has become central to my curriculum. In her short essay, Berthoff describes a writing process in which "students and teachers alike... are discovering that journals need not be limited to personal or 'expressive' writing but that they can be used to record that inner dialogue which is thought." Over twenty years later many teachers and students have begun to use blogging the way we've been using the dialogue journal.

Berthoff describes dialectical note taking like this:

On one side of an open notebook, writers take notes, copy texts, record observations; on the facing page, they respond to those responses, taking notes on their notes and commenting on their comments, observing their observations and thinking about their thinking.

Bloggers can respond that they also enact a productive reiterative process when they spin another thread in the webs that make up the blogosphere. Many bloggers also describe their art as a one that "helps develop the habits of reflection which constitute critical inquiry and creative thinking." Creating places for students to make similar connections the classroom is more of a challenge, but many of us are finding this possible as well.

Berthoff could have been talking about what happens when teachers blog when she writes about the impact of double-entry notebooks: "Teachers become reflective writers and thereby more imaginative, freed at last from the compulsion to find an assignment to follow the one on how to tie-dye tee-shirts or on what to do about skunks under the porch." I'm not sure about those examples, but many of us who have put personal blogging at the center of our writing practice have felt the freedom that Berthoff speaks of here. Blogging allows us to put the student firmly in the center of his or her own inquiry over time.

Just like double-entry notebooks, blogging "can teach everybody the value and usefulness of looking--and looking again."

Re-thinking Youth Voices - TTT114 - 07.23.08

Download Re-thinking Youth Voices - TTT114 - 07.23.08 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 [...]

Just-in-time, just-for-me reading, TTT113 - 07.16.08

Download Just-in-time, just-for-me reading, TTT113 - 07.16.08Listen 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) [...]

A Complex Job: Videocast 09.02.07

While running in NJ, I discuss the many elements of a complex job, from managing computer hardware, to having big ideas and goals, and from developing curriculum to manage the classroom and build community to inviting students into meaningful inquiries. While on my run I map out my curriculum as I begin my new job as a 7th Grade English Language Arts teacher at the East Bronx Academy for the Future. Thanks for listening.

Special Places in NYC

ebaff tagged map - Tagzania

Halloween Inquiry

Halloween Inquiry

Here are some questions that we have begun to explore in our 7th Grade Technology class at East Bronx Academy for the Future. Please listen to our podcast, then add your answers to these questions:

What do you do on Halloween?
How does your community celebrate?
What are some of the best costumes you have ever seen?
Why do we celebrate Halloween?
Where does it come from? What's the history of Halloween?
Is it celebrated everywhere?
Is Halloween different in different countries?
What are some of your questions about Halloween?

Remembering Lee Baber - TTT116 - 08.06.08

Download Remembering Lee Baber - TTT116 - 08.06.08 At some point, as Alex Ragone suggests toward the end of this podcast, words begin to fail. Other media aren’t much help either. For more words and media, please refer to Lee Baber - our friend. Here are a few more of Lee’s words and images, sent to us by [...]

Feeling Good - Vlog 09.22.07

Why aren't more teachers using weblogs, wikis, podcasts, and social networks in their classrooms? For a few years now, I've been doing technology and literacy workshops and summer institutes and presentations in the New York City Writing Project. A variety of teachers -- some young and savvy tech users, some who have avoided computers for many years, some "old-line" tech teachers who are more familiar static websites than blogs and wikis -- participate in these workshops and institutes. Yet only a few do the work once they get back to their classrooms.

This year, I've returned to being a regular 7th Grade English teacher in a pretty normal school (with a bit more technology support than usual). For the past five years I've been a technology teacher who has been given a lab of computers and a lot of support in keeping these computers up-to-date and working. Many of the workshops for other teachers that I've done have been in this lab. When teachers who are enthusiastic about doing this work go out into their own classrooms, they often run into infrastructure problems.

But what exactly do we mean by "infrastructure problems?" It isn't really true that computers aren't available. The schools are generally wired. So where is the rub? This is what I'm trying to pay attention to this year as a 7th Grade English teacher at East Bronx Academy for the Future.

As I say in this video, my focus this Fall is to keep track of all the things I am doing to make Web 2.0 work in my classroom. I want to be clear about the kind of commitment, vision, and hard work it takes to accomplish this. And, I want to demonstrate that it is possible.

What are the hurdles a teacher has to clear to teach with blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other Web 2.0 tools? What does it take to clear these hurdles?

This is an early report. So far I'm feeling pretty good.