New York City Writing Project

TTT#355 What education stories need to be told? with Karen Fasimpaur, Jim Nordlinger, and Marina Lombardo (Youth Voices) 7.3.13

by

On this episode of TTT, @kfasimpaur @JimNordlinger @paulallison @monk51295 and Marina Lombardo consider what video or videos might come from the Youth Voics Summer Program.

This is a planning-in-public episode on Teachers Teaching Teachers, which we held less than a week before we launched into the three-week Youth Voices program this July, which was the New York City Writing Project’s participation in the Summer of Making and Connecting and part of the National Writing Project’s Educator Innovator.

The week before this episode of TTT, with my colleagues in the New York City Writing Project, Grace Raffaele, Jim Nordlinger, Noah Gordon, and Aliyah Hayes, we had been individually meeting 13 high school students were joined by five teachers for a three-week summer program focused on http://youthvoices.net/grid and http://youthvoices.net/play

What an exciting group of youths we were lucky enough to gather for this program! And thank you to all of our supporters who contributed to make this possible!

On this episode of TTT, Jim Nordlinger our video production lead and Karen Fasimpaur (who joined us in the third week) and I continue an ongoning conversations we’ve been having about the story we want to tell with a video that Jim has been shooting about the deep learning students and teachers do together on Youth Voices. Even as I type these notes for the podcast (from my one-week vacation in mid-August) Jim is working to finish editing the many, many hours of video that he captured during our work together in July. Reviewing this episode of TTT and seeing your comments should at least inspire Jim, and might also suggest an angle that he had forgotten.

From the intake interviews in the last week of June (and even before in a teacher’s classroom) to the final exhibition on July 25th Jim has been pointing his camera at our interactions. On this episode of TTT we be talk about what story we want to tell with this video project.

Please take the time to listen to this podcast, then we would love for you to add any insights you might have about what audience we should be aiming to connect with (the average civilian?) and what message we want to convey about the way teachers and students can work together in an online learning space built on National Writing Project values and beliefs.

Enjoy this episode of TTT, as we make transparent our planning process. We would love to have you challenge us and support us, to make us re-think and to be inspired as well.

Click Read more to see the chat that was happening during this live webcast.

TTT #290 – NYCWP Teachers Fostering Youth Voices with Jim Nordlinger, Amal Aboulhosn, Carla Cherry, and Valerie Burton – 3.28.12

by

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers
we have a conversation with three teachers from the New York City Writing Project who are part of a study group that has been sponsored by the NYCWP to foster and reflect on the use of Youth Voices
by these teachers. Paul Allison, Chris Sloan, Monika Hardy
host a conversation with Jim Nordlinger, Amal Aboulhosn, and Carla Cherry from the NYCWP along with our colleagues Valerie Burton, and Fred Mindlin.

teachers290

As an introduction to this conversation, we offer these reflections posted by one of our listeners on her blog, “Short Quips: thinking in (hyper)text” (Check out here blog, to see this teacher’s complete response, and view her About Me.):

Tonight I participated in my first live educational conference online through EdTechTalk. The conference is called “Teachers Teaching Teachers” and takes place every Wednesday night. I did not join the group via video, but rather just watched/listened to the other participants and participated through a live chat feature….

It took me a while to catch up to what was being discussed. Participants were throwing around the term “Youth Voices” and I thought at first that it was just a cool catch phrase for high school kids who were blogging. It wasn’t until i joined the live chat that I got a better idea of what Youth Voices is. Youth Voices, it turns out, is a huge site where the main purpose is to offer a space for youth to participate in discussion. It is a place where youth can post their thoughts and comment on other youth’s thoughts….

One of the discussions among the video participants revolved around how teachers should/are assessing their student’s contributions on Youth Voices. One educator shared how she is setting guidelines for how much/what her students need to contribute to Youth Voices within a specific time frame. For example, she will stipulate that her students need to write one post and make one comment within a week, and if they do both they get the marks for it. This particular educator works at a school in the Bronx and has found that participating in Youth Voices has empowered her students to have their voices heard. She noted how much time and effort can be put into a short comment, because the students are very aware of their online presence and ensuring they present themselves appropriately.

… It was an interesting experience to view it. I think the biggest thing I got out of the experience was that I was also able to network with educators from far and wide- always a positive when you are working on developing your professional learning network.

… I would love to come back to join in a conversation in the future, especially if I am looking for information specifically related to the topic being discussed. I am curious to know whether there are any live educator chats/conferences specifically for Early Childhood Educators. If you know of one, pass it on!



Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.

Teachers Teaching Teahers #230 – What does passionate inquiry look like at a second-chance school in Canarsie, Brooklyn? 1.5.11

by

Last year, shortly after participating in a 3-week Summer Advanced Institute at the New York City Writing Project, our guest on this podcast,
Charlie Freij helped found the East Brooklyn Community High School, Canarsie, NYC, USA.

His students have been using Youth Voices more and more. If you are interested to have your students on Youth Voices — or curious — you should enjoy this podcast.

Check out Charlie’s students’ work here. We’ll also got an update on his school’s program to include online classes.


Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.

Teachers Teaching Teahers #228 – A curriculum potpourri with teachers, students, and Erick Gordon – 12.08.10

by

We had a lively conversation on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers
.

  • Meet Erick Gordon the new director of the New York City Writing Project and the founder of the Student Press Initiative.
  • Enjoy the perspectives of a couple of the digital photographers who are in Chris
    Sloan’s school in Salt Lake City, where they had just published their
    student magazine, the Bulldog Press on MagCloud for the first time.
  • Warm to the thoughts of David
    Pulling from LSU-Eunice who gives us an update on how
    his students I-Search papers. In particular we invite you to take a look at this one by Vonda
    Guidry:     “Potential Health Effects of Food Contamination From the BP Oil Spill.” Paul Allison’s high school students and Vonda had a productive dialogue in the comments under her discussion post.
  • And of course you don’t want to miss Margaret Simon’s elementary school students  who have publishing on Voices on the Gulf — and who now have other ideas, as Margaret explains:

    Things are good and busy.  Our gifted students present a historical
    play each year for first graders in the parish at The Shadows, a
    plantation home on the bayou.  There is much involved in preparing and
    performing, so little else goes on.

    My student Kaylie is working on making Clover the Plover
    a book.  She is illustrating it using Paint on the Promethean board.  I
    hope to publish it on Lulu as a fundraiser for the Gulf.

And
more! Why don’t you drop by too? We invite you to join us every Wednesday


at http://EdTechTalk.com/live
at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA (World Times).


Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #202- The 3R’s of Gaming: Playing, Modding, and Designing – 05.26.10

by

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we learned more about playing, modifying, and designing games. press-villagevoice.png

One of our guests was Scott Price, a game developer or producer at Gamestar Mechanic. A few of us in the New York City Writing Project, especially Susan Ettenheim and Shantanu Saha — both of whom are on this podcast — have been using a beta version of Gamestar Mechanic this spring with their students.

Students or as they are know inside of this game, “Mechanics" can do a bunch of fun and interesting things with Gamestar Mechanic, and most of them fall into three categories:

Quest
You’ll start the game playing the Gamestar Mechanic Quest. You’ll start out as a new arrival in Factory 7. Along the way, you will play games, fix broken games and even design games of your own. As you complete challenges, you’ll collect “sprites”: avatars, enemies, blocks and other tools that serve as the building blocks for making games.
Workshop
In the workshop, you can use the sprites you’ve earned to build your own games. You can edit and change games you have created, add content that tells the “story” behind your game and, of course, play the games you’ve made.
Game Alley
If you’ve created an awesome game, you can publish it to Game Alley. In Game Alley, mechanics can play games created by other users and share the games they have created. You can review and comment on other mechanics’ games to let them know how much their games rock or what they can do to make them better.

 

On this episode of TTT, we were also priviledged to have a 6 grade teacher who has been using Gamestar Mechanic as well as other gaming platforms extensively with his students, Al Doyle.

Al is the “Sports for the Mind” domain teacher at Quest 2 Learn, a new public school in New York City “where students learn to see the world as composed of many different kinds of systems. It is a place to play, invent, grow, and explore.”

3574046938_e75a33cc43_m.jpg
Al Doyle, a native of Brooklyn, has interests ranging from art and animation to set design, digital imaging and most recently, game design. He was the producer and lead animator for the Salvadori Foundation’s Art of Construction, a web site designed to teach basic architecture and engineering to middle school students. For more than twenty years, he has taught computer graphics and multimedia at leading independent New York City K-12 schools. Al developed a popular course for adults, Learning Photoshop Through Art, at the Guggenheim Museum. Al received a Jerome Foundation Fellowship to create a portfolio of prints at Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop which is now in the Library of Congress collection. Al studied stage design at the Polakov Studio in the West Village and was resident designer at HB Studio for several years. In addition, he designed over 100 educational theater productions and over 25 professional designs for ballet, dance, drama, musical theater and opera in off-Broadway and regional theater. As Director of Internet Training at the National Teacher Training Institute for New York’s Channel Thirteen / WNET, Al traveled extensively in a “train-the-trainers” model of technology integration for K-12 teachers. Currently, in addition to his role at Quest, Al teaches for the graduate division of Touro College’s Masters Degree Program in Instructional Technology.

 We hope you enjoy this episode, and we invite you to join us in our quest learn more about how to understand “game mechanics.” We want to imagine the different possibilities that Gamestar Mechanic and other sites like this provide to our students as we make room for these new literacies of game play, game modding, and game design!

Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #188 – A snow day in NYC gives us a chance to do some collaborative planning – 02.26.10

by

Because of a rare snow day in New York City, four NYC Writing Project teachers used some of our "found time" to do some impromptu thinking together. Our students are using Youth Voices, and recently we agreed to build a new curriculum this Spring.  We got together on Skype today to discuss our budding plans for teaching "I-Search, Diigo, and Gaming."

What you will hear us discussing on this podcast is the beginning of a plan for a research and gaming curriculum and a proposal for a series of three or four professional development sessions this Spring that are focused on some portion of the game-playing and game-building curriculum that Global Kids has developed. We also have a plan for inviting other interested New York City Writing Project teachers to join us by experimenting with gaming themselves and by developing this curriculum with us.

What our small study group, the New York City Writing Project’s "Tech Thursdays" group wants to do is to create a curriculum that has modules that can fit into different types of for classes, especially core subject areas. For now we are doing this work in the following content areas:

  • Computer Arts (Susan Ettenheim)
  • English (Paul Allison and Chris Sloan)
  • Technology (Shantanu Saha and Madeline Brownstone)
  • Art (Renee Dryg and David Marini)

We are creating a curriculum that assumes that teachers will be able to commit to doing it two times a week for at least 10 weeks (or similar parameters).

Those  of us working on this curriculum this Spring will build successful collaborative game-based learning experiences for our students and we will learn from our failures. At the same time, we will be constantly building the rationales and the theoretical framework for including a curriculum like this into core classes in grades 6 -12.  We are thinking about how we might involve other New York City Writing Project teachers in this work, perhaps in summer institue that integrates gaming into our current Advanced Summer Institute model. We are also planning for day-long workshops and regular study groups like our Tech Thursday groups in the Fall 2010 and Spring 2011.

We would also welcome your participation! As we say in this podcast, we will be using the What’s Up? section of Youth Voices to have our student-gamers become more reflective about gaming, and we’ll ask the students to contribute to the knowledge based of serious gaming by developing analyses by adding Discussions to Youth Voices, for example here are Comparative Essays from the first week of our new curriculum. If you have been looking for a way for your students to join Youth Voices, perhaps you could adapt, adopt, and contribut to this curriculum as well. Please join Youth Voices, and let us know!

In the meantime, we welcome you to eavesdrop on this impromptu planning session shared by four New York City public school teachers enjoying a rare snow day in New York City: Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, Madeline Brownstone, and Shantanu Saha.

Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #159 – 07.08.09 – Learning with Technology in a Writing Project Summer Institute

by

For this podcast, we invited five New York City educators who, at the time, were in the middle of a 3-week Summer Institute with the New York City Writing Project. Paul Allison and Shantanu Saha were the facilitators for this Institute in which participants were invited to:

Spend 12 days this summer with other New York City Writing Project teachers who use technology in their classrooms. Share the ways we use the Internet to make student-to-student connections. Learn about a curriculum currently being developed and collaborated on by teachers across the nation. Explore how we use blogs, wikis, images, videos, podcasts, and other tools to inspire young people to do research into their own questions.

These are five of the teachers who joined us:

  • Charlie Freij, Technology/English Teacher, East Brooklyn Community High School
  • Doug Condon, Art Teacher, Academy of American Studies in Queens
  • Julio Benitez, English Teacher, High School for Construction Trades, Engineering, and Architecture, Queens
  • Karen Levy, Library Media Specialist, Christopher Columbus High School, Bronx
  • Michael Dodes, Library Media Specialist, samuel Gompers Career/Technonogy Ed High School, Bronx

We also had a wonderful surprise guest, Suzie Boss. Just before going live with this webcast (that is recorded here as a podcast), Paul noticed that Suzie Boss was online in Skype. Since we had been talking about her book earlier in the day, Paul took a chance and invited Suzie to join them. What an thoughful, supportive, informed guest she was!

And that’s not all. We were also joined by Mike from Central Texas. He’s been teaching for 40 years, using inquiry, Great Books Discussions, and the New Jersey Writing Project (in Texas) as his touchstones, and recently he has been exploring Web 2.0 tools. This was his first skype call.

How wonderful it was to add these names to our list of guests:

Please enjoy the podcast. Find out what happens in a tech-focused Advanced/Open Summer Institute in the New York City Writing Project.

Click Read more to see a transcript of a chat that was happening during the webcast.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #38: Teaching Blogging

by
EdTechTalk: Teachers Teaching Teachers #38

Teaching Blogging

January 31, 2007

Download mp3 (52:23, 25 MB)



The night before she started her Spring Semester classes at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in New York City, Susan Ettenheim participated in a dialogue via skype with teachers from four different Writing Projects: Paul Allison (NYC), Matt Makowetski (South Coast, CA), Bill O’Neal (Trenton, NJ), and Bob LeVin (Area 3 in CA). This is a podcast of that conversation.

Along with Chris Sloan in Salt Lake City (Utah WP), the six of us are beginning a complex, exciting collaboration with our students in an elgg, YouthVoices.net. Listen as we plan, take a look at Susan’s introduction to her students, and consider joining us. You might leave a comment here, then go over to YouthVoices and see what all the excitement is about.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #37: Rethinking Journalism with Chris Sloan

by
EdTechTalk: Teachers Teaching Teachers #37

Rethinking Journalism with Chris Sloan

January 24, 2007

Download mp3 (70:58, 34 MB)



Writing like the post that we’ve copied here makes it easy to listen to what our students think about our work with them. Here’s what a 9th grader in Chris Sloan’s class thinks about blogging at YouthVoices.net:

What makes a good blog post, by Parker at Judge Memorial High School, Salt Lake City

To create a really good blog post, I really think that people need to open up to the readers. Honesty is most effective, because the actual emotion that others put down is probably something that others have experienced, or can relate to. For example, i just read a letter a girl wrote to her father, but he passed away four years ago. It was the most personal, morose, true example of sadness that i have ever read, let alone on youthvoices. I don’t know anything like that personally, but the raw openness made it something that i felt, not just read. I’ve also published some poems on the site, and i’ve gotten some varied, but positive, responses to those, and that’s encouraging.   more below

css.php