http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=3

Join Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, and Richard Stohlman for a discussion about different models for providing tech support in the public schools. We begin with stories about what people’s experiences have been, then move to what people think is ideal and viable, what they’ve seen done, what can be done.

How can we spread technologies like blogs, wikis, podcasts, video, digital stories and poems, mashups and such… to other teachers in our school? And don’t we need to have a flexible, visionary technology plan? Although we still need technicians who help us to fix the printers and manage our servers, we also need a new kind of tech-teacher-leader who teaches her own classes as well as supports other teachers to use new technologies.

Each of us teach and coach in different ways in our schools. In this podcast we describe how we work now with students and teachers, then we think together about how schools might better support technology use by more teachers across the curriculum.

We end by proposing that we work on a technology plan together on a wiki.

http://www.teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=22

In this recording of a live webcast from Wednesday, May 24, 2006, we begin with suggesting a possible structure for thinking about a technology curriculum or plan. We agree to tell stories about our classrooms using David Warlick’s “three qualities” of “new technologies, especially the Internet:”

1. Rich Interactive Information: Information that can be searched, processed, and assembled.


2. Collaboration: Students & Teachers can collaborate through the Internet with peers, experts, and online communities.


3. Self-Expression: Students can publish their work, using compelling media, to real audiences, receiving authentic audience feedback.
   
   (See David F. Warlick’s Raw Materials for the Mind, 4th Edition. 2005. pp. 19 & 20.)

Soon we get stuck in the first one, and we focus down on what kinds of research tools we have been using this year, and what we want to continue to use in the future. We discuss RSS feeds, aggregrators such as Netvibes and Bloglines (and in the chat room, someone suggested Pageflakes), wikis, and Podzinger.

Please join us for our next webcast this coming Wednednesday at 9:00 pm EST. Skype SusanEttenheim.

http://www.teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=21

Join us at the Webcast Academy (and Skype SusanEttenheim) Wednesday, May 31, 2006 at 9:00 pm EST for a discussion of these questions:

When setting up group blogs or wikis in schools, one of the first set of questions has to do with the focus of the blog or wiki.

• Is the site about the content of a particular course which a new group of students joins each semester?


• Or is the blog/wiki for the particular group of students in a class, and therefore it closes at the end of a class?

Other questions quickly follow:

• Is the blog/wiki going to be public or private? Will readers be limited to those who we register or will registration be open? Who will have permission to write responses or new posts to the blog/wiki? Will there be a review process before something gets posted?


• Would it be best if we could give students their own blogs/wikis, and aggregrate these into one class-wide or school-wide blog?


• Or is there something more useful about having a group class-wide blog/wiki? How can we set up blogs/wikis that have multiple classes and schools using them, yet make it possible for individual students and classes to see their work separately?

By now some of us have tried any number of these possibilities. Let’s get together and talk about what has gone well and what hasn’t in designing blogs and wikis for our classrooms and schools. Let’s tell our stories with an eye to the future of what we might do next year.