<p><a href="http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=59">http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=59</a></p> <p>How exciting to report that we are on the verge of needing sentence starters again. Students are posing on their blogs, and other students have begun to respond as well, more so on YouthVoices.net than on the PersonalLearningSpace.com, but this will come very soon too.</p><br /> <ul><br /> <li>What kinds of response do we want our students to make?</li><br /> <li>How do we push them to go further than, &#8220;Niceee Poem!&#8221;</li><br /> <li>How do we get students to connent on substantial content and not on surface correctness?</li><br /> <li>How do we encourage them to do more than merely respond, to move toward real dialogue, pushing the topic to the next level?</li><br /> </ul><br /> <p>For a few years now, a few teachers at East Side Community High School and I have been planning around questions such as these by asking students to use sentence starters in their blogs. These starters provide students with a structure within which &#8212; and against which &#8212; to express their own thoughts and ideas. As you can see from this example, they are more than &#8220;openers.&#8221; With sentence starters, we suggest specific ways to begin, make transitions, and to end the written responses students write for each other.</p><br /> <p>We be talking about encouraging students comments more tonight, on Teachers Teaching Teachers, 9:00 pm Eastern on the <a target="_blank" href="http://teachersteachingteachers.org/Dear%20%3CWriter%27s%20Name%3E:">EdTechTalk.com</a> Please join us!</p><br /> <p>Here&#8217;s one example of sentence startes Chris Sloan, Susan Ettenheim, and I provided to students last year on <a target="_blank" href="http://blogs.writingproject.org/blogwrite%20265">Youth Voices Coast to Coast</a>. Let us know what you think.</p><br /> <blockquote><p>Dear :</p><br /> <p>I just listened to an episode of your podcast, &#8220;,&#8221; and what I remember most is <... Add 2 or 3 sentences describing what stands out for you and why.><br /><br /> When you said, &#8220;&#8221; I was thinking I think this is _____ (<span style="text-decoration: underline" />descriptive adjective)> because&#8230;<br /><br /> Another part that I <_______ (strong verb)> was: &#8220;&#8221; This stood out for me because <... Add 1 or 2 sentences.><br /><br /> I agree with you that <... Summarize something from the podcast that you have an opinion about.> One reason I say this is<... Explain in 1 or 2 sentences.> Another reason I agree/disagree with you is <... Give another reason in a couple of sentences.></p></blockquote>

http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=60

Recently I was invited by American Teacher to respond to the question, “Does Wikipedia hurt scholarship?” in their Speak Out column. Below is my “no” response.

NO

Wiki skills are essential in academics and life

By Thomas Locke

Wikis, from the Hawaiian “wikiwiki” for “quick,” are Web sites that anyone can edit quickly and easily. One of the best-known examples is Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia that has gained widespread use.

In February, I started a wiki with my elementary students. Using a format loosely inspired by Wikipedia, the students have created more than a thousand entries on topics ranging from allspice to Yu-Gi-Oh. I’ve been thrilled to see students actively reading, writing and editing; and the topics hold meaning for them. The wiki empowers students by giving them a space to publish their thoughts and continually refine them.

As wikis grow in popularity, some detractors have questioned their legitimacy in regard to scholarship. One of the main criticisms leveled at wikis is that many, like Wikipedia, are open to editing by anyone with Internet access. This leads to questions about the expertise and motives of those writing and editing the Wikipedia text.

In practice, however, such concerns have not proved particularly problematic. As in any resource, errors occur and writers have biases; media literacy and analytical skills are always important. Especially in wikis such as Wikipedia, however, the writing tends to be fairly reliable precisely because it is so widely used. When errors do occur, they often are corrected within hours. In a comparison of Encyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipedia, the journal Nature found Britannica had only slightly fewer errors than Wikipedia.

Rather than harm scholarship, my experience has shown that wikis promote and inspire scholarship. A student may read an article, have her interest sparked, do more research and then contribute to the original article. If opinions differ, a debate may spring up in the discussion section of that article. This kind of exchange is an essential feature of scholarship—having one’s ideas challenged in a constructive manner and defending them by clarifying and offering examples and proofs.

Further, wikis facilitate a defining feature of traditional scholarship: publication. Changes to a wiki are immediately “published” for the entire world to see. Not only does this provide a real-world motivation for students, it also allows them to experience writing and editing as a dynamic endeavor.

Unlike a more static writing process in which publication marks the end of revisions and the end of the process, wiki writing is instantly published while undergoing infinite revisions. The wiki therefore brings literacy and accountability to a whole new level. Students are not simply skimming for content, they are constantly evaluating from an editor’s point of view in order to improve what they are reading/publishing.

Finally, as users build on one another’s articles, they learn firsthand how to work collaboratively in a community of other learners. These are skills that are essential in academia, and in life.

http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=61

Continue the conversation about developing student comments from our Wednesday night broadcast last week and join us this coming Wednesday, 9pm EST USA to continue the conversation!

http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=62

Join seven teachers as we discuss blogging in elggs, creating avatars or icons, guiding students toward making personal and academic comments, managing a cross-school webcast by and for 8th graders. Listen as Paul Allison, Madeline Brownstone, Dave Cormier, Susan Ettenheim, Troy Hicks, and Chris Sloan mix it up, tell stories, and plan our next moves together!

Communities in Youth Voices: Mapping, How am I doing?, Books, Avatars and Icons, Podcasts…

Communities in the Personal Learning Space: Mapping, ReadingRoom

Join everybody this weekend at A Worldbridges Webcastathon ~ Oct. 13~15

http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=64

Our conversation this evening began innocently enough with Gail Desler, the technology liaison for the Area 3 Writing Project in and around Sacramento, California, describing her work over the past four years with blogging in the classroom. Last year 3 different Writing Projects and 5 schools joined together in a project called “Youth Voices: Coast to Valley.” Given that we have stolen their name, “Youth Voices” in an attempt to broaden our network of schools, we are delighted to include Gail and her teachers in the elgg at http://youthvoices.net! Last night Gail said that some of the same teachers from last year’s work would be joining the new Youth Voices. A great question that Gail has been asking is, “How can we sustain and deepen online conversations on a blog?” And part of this has to do with finding the right balance between personal blogging and common blogging around a theme or text.

Of course, Gail couldn’t leave it at that! She is also bringing video-conferencing, and this led Paul Allison and Lee Barber to think about how to structure their weekly Webcast, Spacecast. Susan Ettenheim is also working to create an online radio station at her school, following Chris Sloan’s lead in Salt Lake City, Utah. This conversation led to an educator from Florida calling in to discuss the kinds of video-conferencing he and his colleagues at an aquarium are doing. Eventually we got Troy Hicks into the conversation, and he pushed in his provocative question: Should all teachers have their students blog? Or, What technologies should we be encouraging teachers to use?

This conversation, like many of our discussions on Wednesday evenings, leads me (Paul) to think that been we — those of us who are working with Web 2.0 technologies in our classrooms — need our own separate discipline. Maybe it’s just my present teaching situation that leads me to feel this way, but I wonder how many others feel like teachers without a discipline. In my school, I’m variously known at the computer or technology or journalism teacher. I teach a “studio” or elective subject which meets when the core-subject teachers have meetings to co-plan their classes. Obviously, since my classes happen when these vertical (or discipline) meetings are taking place, I can’t really be part of any of these teams of teachers. The only exception comes once or twice a month when Friday afternoons are set aside for vertical meetings. Even then, I usually find myself in a room with talented teachers of art, drama, dance, yoga — all of us trying to remember how we ended up on the same team, the “Studio Department.”

This week was unusual. The art teacher, who chairs our Studio Department, was out at a meeting when the rest of the school was scheduled to meet in departments. The Humanities team was meeting with a consultant from a local college in one room, and in another, there was a meeting about the new smart boards that were being introduced in our school. Which meeting would I go to: literacy or technology? At the last minute, over the public address system the drama teacher and I were invited to the Humanities meeting, and seeing little use for a smart board in my own classroom, I was happy to join my colleagues who teach reading, writing, and history in the 6th - 10th grades, the Humanities Team.

I have a lot of respect for these dedicated, hardworking, smart young teachers. Yet while sitting with them in this meeting, I kept asking why so much effort is being put into teaching personal narrative. For weeks and weeks and into months, every year from sixth through tenth grades, students are trained in the craft of writing vignettes, anecdote, and memoirs. Teachers model particular techniques, make lists of expectations and rubrics for assessment, and read and red-mark stacks and stacks of personal narratives.

I wonder though what these teachers would think of Dave Warlick’s notion that “a teacher who is not using technology [is not] doing their job.” Warlick has been arguing that we should stop talking about integrating technology, and instead start talking about a new kind of literacy. For example (August 29, 2006)

Much has been written lately about technology in the classroom — as to whether it is optional or even relevant. This conversation is understandable, given the time of the year. I ask myself two questions in reaction.

1. Can a teacher be a good teacher without using technology? A resounding “YES!”


2. Is a teacher who is not using technology doing their job? An emphatic “NO!”

But, of course, it isn’t so simple. “My kids use the pencil sharpener. That’s technology.” It’s why I try not to use that word, and urge others to stop trying to “Integrate technology” It’s too big. It means too many things. It’s why I keep hammer[ing] on literacy, that it’s information that has changed (digital, networked, overwhelming, and the more esoteric changes that have come about because of the read/write web). If we can expand what it means to be literate to reflect the changing information environment, and integrate that, then we might start using technology for what it is, the pencil and paper of our time.

2 Cents Worth » Stop Using that Word

Given all of the tools at our disposal — blogs, elggs, podcasting, webcasting, videocasting — what should we be teaching? A few weeks ago (26 Sept 2006), Will Richardson asked on his blog:

What’s in Your Curriculum? Is there anyone out there who has all of the below integrated somewhere into the curriculum? 4 out of 5? 3?

1. Wikipedia–as in teaching kids about the collaborative construction of knowledge.


2. Cell phones–as in teaching how to use them effectively as tools for “just in time learning.”


3. MySpace–as in teaching the safe and effective use of the Internet to build networks and publish content.


4. Martinlutherking.org–as in teaching the skills necessary for navigating a world where editing occurs post publication.


5. Google–as in teaching the skills to find the information we want. What other “basics” would you add?

Weblogg-ed » What’s in Your Curriculum?

Will received some pretty interesting answers, and these are worth checking out at his site. The reason I wanted to copy them here, however, is to suggest the body of teaching and learning that exists for the development of this new discipline. There is so much in this “new literacy” that we call Web 2.0 that we need our own discipline.

Please join in this conversation…

http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=66

http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=65

I am a sixth year teacher.  I am feeling a serious case of burnout.  The other day I had a student who asked me if I was going to teach for the rest of my life.  I had the flu, and me always being blunt, I gave him a resounding, “Hell no!”

Lately, I have not been feeling like I want to be at work at all.  I then came up with an Idea.  I thought of coming up with a radio show or podcasts where teachers could vent about their frustrations.  It is the other side of teaching.  A more satyrical and witty look at teachers.  The funny moments and smart ass comments that and stories that make others laugh when you tell them about it.  If I created a forum, would other teachers be interested?  Keep in my mind, It is a radio show that is an entertaning outlet for teachers to vent out their frustrations in a humorous way.  The show will be politically incorrect and some of the topics will be controversial.

 

Any takers?

http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=67

Perhaps it’s time for a “show and tell” format. By looking at a few very real examples, we might be able to sketch how wide the register can be for student podcasts, webcasts, video blogs, radio shows, or online newspapers.

Madeline

One of our guests will be Madeline Brownstone, a middle school teacher at the Baccalaureate School for Global Education, in Queens, NYC. Madeline started a blog (not her first) this summer: On Finding Flow, Flotsam and Jetsam in a 3-week summer institute with the New York City Writing Project. She is an experienced technology teacher has found a new home in Web 2.0 tools. Every Tuesday, Madeline sponsors a “Radio Free BSGE Broadcasting club” at her school. In an email to Paul Allison and Lee Barber, Madeline describes what it was like to introduce a live webcast via a podcast, google maps, and blogging to her 8th graders in this club on Tuesday, October 24th:

My girls were psyched today. They listened to the 10-20-06 SpaceCast and were very excited. Kristin and Kathy were the two girls who joined [Lee Barber and her students in Virginia] on Friday. Others wanted to know if they could participate too…. I got the filters lifted on CommunityWalk.com and got my broadcast group into it today. I think they got one entry point up today. I also got the broadcast group into the Personal Learning Space today. Some of them left blogs on the Space Cast 7 episode. I haven’t read them yet, but they want to communicate with the Shenandoah Valley kids. In fact, they would like me to see if we can do an exchange with VA. We have done a number of exchanges, two with Denmark, one with France, and one with Amman Jordan. How about an exchange between Queens, NYC and Shenandoah Valley? Think about it! It could be really cool.

As you can tell Madeline is bubbling with ideas and experiences to share.

Lorraine

To get a sense of the range of this work we also want to invite a new voices into our commuity of bloggers, x-casters, and mappers. Lorraine Nowlin, an English teacher at a high school in the Bronx brought her blogging skills to the NYCWP Technology Institute this summer, working along side Madeline and others. Recently Lorraine has begun to enroll her students at Youth Voices. Here’s what Lorraine wrote recently on her blog about bringing blogging into her English curriculum:

BLOGGING IN MY CLASSROOM

Posted October 19th, 2006 by Lorraine Nowlin

As it stands, I don’t anticipate too many problems with blogging this year. It is however taking longer than I anticipated. What will most likely work for me and my class are periodic visits to the library so that they will be able to write and post to their blogs. We will start with writing prompts generated by me and eventually the students. As you can see, my approach has always been guided to open. My long term goals are for my students to use blogging in order to reflect on their research project. The ninth graders will be focusing on teen violence. I am not yet sure what my tenth graders will focus on. I usually base my projects on the literature presented in class. The issue for the tenth grade is that there are books in which they are required to read. The themes within the required reading aren’t obviously connected. I can certainly find a way to connect them all, but it will require much thought that could lead to a project which is too technical. How could I connect Romeo & Juliet to The Pearl? How could I connect A Raisin in the Sun with of Mice and Men?

Perhaps I am being too rigid in my requirements. The students could probably do a research project not centered only on books we’ve read in class, but books they are reading on their own. I could possibly not focus the projects on books at all. The possibilities are endless.

http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=68

Here is the first podcast.  Enjoy!  We will have an email and website so you can tell us any concerns, have questions, or things you want to vent about for our next podcast.  Remember names were change, and animals were not harmed during this podcast.

http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=69

Has writing really changed? What’s the difference — really — between writing an essay and writing a blog post? Has the use of images really changed the writing process? Digital technologies are great, but don’t we still have to teach kids how to write the way we always did? What’s the difference?

To further our discussion of these questions five teachers — Paul Allison, Lee Barber, Susan Ettenheim, Teb Locke, and Chris Sloan — will get together for a conversation this week on Teachers Teaching Teachers (Wednesday at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time, Americas). We come from and an elementary school, a middle school, a 6-12 secondary school, and high schools. We hail from New York City, the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, and Salt Lake City, Utah. We are Writing Project teachers, English teachers, art Teachers, Webheads, science teachers, and members of the World Bridges community. Over the past couple of years we have come together because of our interest in teaching with Web 2.0 tools in the classroom.

For example, in a couple of weeks, at the National Writing Project’s 2006 Annual Meeting in Nashville, Chris Sloan and Paul Allison will be facilitating a “roundtable exchange” with 25 Tech Liaisons for Writing Projects all over the United States. The session is titled “Multimedia and Multimodal, and here is how they described their session:

How do changes in technology change the type of writing students do and the way they interact with each other? How does digital writing differ from traditional writing? Presenters will lead a discussion and share experiences about the way blogging, podcasting, and other newer technologies that incorporate sound, image, and collaborative techniques have played out in their classrooms and at their writing project sites. This roundtable exchange is for teachers at all levels, kindergarten through college.

Along with Susan Ettenheim, Paul and Chris worked with their students on a blog and podcasting site together last year at Youth Voices Coast to Coast: NYC and Utah. This fall the project has morphed into a potentially larger project at YouthVoices.net and PersonalLearningSpace.com,  “elgg powered ” social networking sites open to any high school and middle school students or teachers. Lee Baber who manages the middle school PersonalLearningSpace joins Paul, Susan and Chris this year in the planning.

To see an example of this work, take a look at Paul Allison’s Juniors and Seniors at East Side Community High School, NYC.  On their podcast, listen to what these students have been writing about on their personal blogs in Youth Voices. Recently Paul pulled together the RSS feeds from each of his 24 students in “New Journalism 2007 and 2008.” Using xFruits and Feedburner, he created a podcast with these young voices. You can subscribe here, or in iTunes.

In addition, Chris and his Media students at Judge Memorial High School in Salt Lake City, have been exploding with video, text, photographs and podcasts! Take a look at the Bulldog Blog. The post from Monday, Oct. 23rd might suggest how excited his students are about this work:

Monday, October 23, 2006

MORE STUFF COMING

There are more videos, pictures, and radio clips coming all the time. There are so many things going on here. Photos, movies, and radio are updated at least once a week! Here’s what is coming soon.

COMING UP:

-In the Classroom: Get Your Yoga On

-An all new Mike and Rob Show, our very own Sports Radio

-Pictures of anything and everything

-Radio interviews that you don’t want to miss

-Pep Rally 2006: The exciting assembly, interviews, and other features about the week.

***Look for our written issue coming out soon…

-The Bulldog Press Posted by Judge Media at 6:20 PM

Wow! Did you notice that they still produce a written issue too?

In another example of using Web 2.0 tools, Chris Sloan and Susan Ettenheim, who teaches at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in NYC, have also been cooking up some collaborative projects via webcasting. Susan is starting a school radio station: ElRo Live! One of the three achievements listed in Wikipedia (so it must be true) for ElRo reads as follows (or at least it did at 11:34 PM on Tuesday, October 24, 2006):

Eleanor Roosevelt has also been successful in starting a webcasting (Internet radio) program, under supervision of Susan Ettenheim, and with senior webcasting hosts Cedric Tam (Big C at Sports Central) and David Lugassy (M.One the real One).

New technologies allow students to engage in purposeful discourse based on shared interests (the radio station), although these collaborations across time zones and between academic schedules in high schools are challenging. Susan remembers her daughter, in elementary school, under the guidance of Shelley Harwayne, engaging in purposeful writing. This project is an opportunity to use the newest technologies to stretch the possibility of purposeful, shared ideas across time and place.

In a similar way Lee Barber, a teacher at Hillyard Middle School, in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, has been the inspiration behind an elgg for middle school students, Personal Learning Space . This middle school elgg has students from Canada, the U.S, and Brazil, are using blogging, podcasting, photos, and videos to learn more about their communities as well as mapping on the CommunityWalks:EntryPoints. (Both high school and middle school are working on the mapping project.) This highly charged group meets weekly in a live webcast called SpaceCast to encourage collaboration as well as learning first steps toward digital and traditional writing skills and social networking. You can subscribe to the SpaceCast  podcast here, or in iTunes.

This year, Teb Locke has been recently starting Elgging with his third, fourth and fifth grade students at the Neighborhood School in New York City on the Neighborhood Elgg.  At this point, students have started to develop their profiles, but most the students have simply written their “introductions”.  Most of the third graders have drawn, scanned and uploaded their self-portraits to use as icons for their user names.  This coming Friday, Teb is planning to have the students finish their profiles and explore the concept of tags or “keywords”, so they can start “making friends.”  In addition to expanding this Elgg to more classes in the Neighborhood School, Teb has also spoken with two teachers at other elementary schools in the hopes of extending the community of this elementary school Elgg.  Lastly, another project the third graders have been working on involves the use of ComunityWalk.com.  Students have been documenting their favorite places.  At this point this project is still very much a work in progress, but the idea is the students write about their favorite places explaining the places’ significance, record a sound file of their explanation, draw a picture of this place so that it might be scanned and uploaded to CommunityWalk.com, and link the classes map, image and sound files to the school’s blog, the NeighborhoodBlog.

Paul, Lee, Susan, Teb, and Chris would welcome any colleagues to join them in these adventures. They have stories to tell about teaching with these new tools. Don’t look for too many conclusions yet! The written, visual and audio work that Paul’s students are doing in his New Journalism class is quite different from Chris’s Bulldogs and Chris’s New Media students are on a path different from Susan’s webcasting hosts on ElRo Live! or in her Computer Arts class. Teb’s third graders are learning the keyboard so that they can blog and Lee’s SpaceCast crew are still gathering steam to become the new high school group in the coming years. But we all come together because we recognize that we are on the cusp of something very exciting, and different, something much bigger than the sum of the parts: reading and writing with images and sound for purposeful communication across schools. Or maybe that is big enough?