EdTechTalk

On this episode of  Teachers Teaching Teachers,we talk to teachers from the Gulf Coast again. School has started in many places along the Gulf, and there are many different and mixed reactions as the emergency has turned into a long-term clean up effort and part of a chronic crisis in the region.

On this podcast you'll learn what teachers and students on the Gulf were thinking about the BP oil spill in at the beginning of August, about 3 weeks after the cap was put on the Deepwater rig. You'll also learn why they believe that the “Voices on the Gulf” project is more important than ever. If you haven’t signed up yet. We’dlove for anybody who listens to Teachers Teaching Teachers to join the site!

We expect that students’ voices will dominate on the site once more schools start up, but we’d love to hear your plans, your thoughts, your voices on the site right now! Thanks!

On this podcast, Matt Montagne and Paul Allison are joined by:

• David Pulling, National Writing Project of Acadiana, Louisiana
• Stacey Ferguson, Live Oak Writing Project, Mississippi
• Catherine Tibbs, Live Oak Writing Project, Mississippi
• Lynette Herring-Harris, Program Associate, National Writing Project, based in Mississippi

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

46:56 minutes (10.74 MB)

read more

As you will hear on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we are very excited about the new website, http://voicesonthegulf.org ! On this podcast we are joined by:

• Andrea Zellner, Stumbling Toward Proficiency
• Chris Sloan, Sloan Space
• Matt Montagne, The Digital Downlow
• Diana Laufenberg, Living the Dream
• Buffy Hamilton, The Unquiet Library
• Lisa Nielsen, The Innovative Educator

We are putting together a team to help us to develop this site — and fast. We've set up the following Community Managers:

David Pulling (Louisiana) - Site Manager
Paul Allison (New York) - Site Manager

Catherine Tibbs (Mississippi) - Art and Humanities
Ellen Steigman (Louisiana) - Art and Humanities
Susan Ettenheim (New York) - Art and Humanities

Paige Baggett (Alabama) - Community and Culture
Suzie Boss (Oregon) - Community and Culture

Jeff Mason (Florida) - Health and Wellness
Andrea Zellner (Michigan) - Health and Wellness

Natasha Whitton (Louisiana) - Money and Careers
Chris Sloan (Utah) - Money and Careers

Alicia Blair (Mississippi) - Nature and the Environment
Matt Montagne (California) - Nature and the Environment

Kyle Meador (Louisiana) - Social Issues and Human Rights
Diana Laufenberg (Pennsylvania) - Social Issues and Human Rights

Stacey Ferguson (Mississippi) - Our Space (K-6)
Margaret Simon (Louisiana) - Our Space (K-6)
Gail Desler (California) -  Our Space (K-6)
Kevin Hodgson (Massachusetts) - Our Space (K-6)

Along with this growing group of National Writing Project teachers, teachers from along the Gulf Coast, teachers in Edutopia’s pblcmp, AND/OR teachers involved with the EdTechTalk/WorldBridges community, we have been organizing (and working with Bill Fitzgerald at FunnyMonkey) to build this site that will do the following:

1. Provide a place where we can collect, amplify, and engage the poems, stories, and essays that students along the Gulf Coast bring to their teachers this month, as schools open.
2. Layer these stories, poems, and essays with online sources, including news releases and poetry (such as the poems on Poets for Living Waters).
3. We don’t know yet! Many of us have been working for some time on building a site like Voices on the Gulf, and we have some idea what directions this will take, AND we want to allow the discussions on the site to help us know how to develop.

The most important item, above is #1 - we are working as fast and hard as possible to get the site out to teachers, and for it to be easy to use. If you would like to add a poem, thought, or anything, please sign up, then once you’ve been made into a member, you’ll see the Add Discussion button. Please go in and write a brief reflection, add  photo, a video, or almost anything — just to see how easy it is to do. AGAIN, THANKS!

Students have been coming back the past couple of weeks in many Gulf Coast schools. A lot of our connections with teachers on the Gulf have happened this summer on a live webcast that we do every Wednesday evening. You may have already been on the show. We would love it if you would come back. We’ve been able to make a lot of invaluable connections. You can see what we mean here: http://edtechtalk.com/teachersteachingteachers

We would love to invite you to join us on Teachers Teaching Teachers every Wednesday at 6:00 p.m. Pacific / 8:00 p.m. Central / 9:00 p.m. Eastern. If you use Skype, please email Paul Allison or Susan Ettenheim and let us know your Skype name (again)— just helps us to know who to look for! We hope that you will be able to join us soon on a Wednesday evening.

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

41:26 minutes (9.48 MB)

read more

Welcome to the EdTechTalk newsletter for August 7, 2010 through August 20, 2010. North America is getting ready to return to school during the next couple weeks. We expect several shows to return to a regular broadcast schedule at that time. During the last couple of weeks while many of us were intense upon enjoying the last of our summer's, the following shows were on the air.

 

read more

Susan Ko, Executive Director of the Center of Teaching Excellence at University of Maryland University College, published the first edition of Teaching Online: A Practical Guide 10 years ago. The third edition, published this year, reflects a number of changes that have happened in the field over that last several years such as the: Web 2.0 revolution, growing acceptance of online education, need for special training and continuing support for faculty and students, team course development, growth of open educational resources, and increasing use of mobile devices.

With unassuming clarity, Susan addresses a number of key issues facing designers and faculty in higher (and K-12) education today.

Available on the Web

Aug 20, 2010 10:01:49 AM - IDL 27: SUSAN KO--PRACTICAL ONLINE TEACHING
02:31 - Robert: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415997263/
03:31 - Jennifer: oooh! A kindle edition, too! http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Online-Practical-Guide-ebook/dp/B003AU7E8...
05:38 - Jennifer: What about synchronous teaching options? Is this changing the face of online learning in your experience?
16:31 - Jennifer: how have "perceptions" of oline learning changed (or not) over the years? perceptions of quality, satisfaction, faculty buy-in, etc?
24:05 - Jason: Neiffer: Sure
24:19 - Robert: yes
25:41 - Jennifer: @jason ... I think k-12 is going to be a HUGE driver in online learning ... esp. taking online learning from being for "alternative" adult learners to far more maintream
29:13 - Jennifer: @jason ... good point re: importance of taking an online course (or program) to "get it"
30:30 - Marlene: Yes, continuous improvement is an important aspect of online teaching.
30:42 - Jason Neiffer: Good question, Robert...
31:53 - Jennifer: Great! Thank you, Susan ... another fun virtual "brown bag" lunch for me :)
32:38 - Marlene: Thanks, Susan!
32:38 - Jason Neiffer: Thanks everyone! :)

32:31 minutes (14.89 MB)

read more

This summer, we could feel the energy growing around teachers building curriculum about the BP oil spill. This episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers one example. This conversation is part of our ongoing series of podcasts focused on collecting stories, ideas, curriculum, connections, and resources that will help us teach about the Gulf oil spill this fall. Our guests include:

• Teachers who worked together on project plans, It Affects Us All, in Suzie Boss’s Problem-based Learning camp at Edutopia join us.
• We are also joined by Andy Rosenbloom, Program Director for the Virtual Team Challenge: Spill! Andy writes:

Even though you’re busy this summer with countless poolside BBQs, it’s never too early to plan ahead for Fall semester curriculum.The Virtual Team Challenge is an entirely FREE online, multiplayer business simulation that takes place in the animated 3D world of New City. The team objective in the simulation is to help the mayor stage the most efficient oil spill recovery effort. Top-performing teams are eligible for prizes for themselves, their teachers, and local charities! Virtual Team Challenge will run this Fall from October 12 – November 24. See our article in The New York Times to read about one NJ teacher’s success with the program. Virtual Team Challenge comes complete with lesson plans and in-class exercises which form a curriculum that highlights general business acumen, business ethics, negotiation skills, decision-making processes and accounting while placing a special emphasis on important life/career skills such as teamwork, communication, professionalism and research methods. Register now at www.virtualteamchallenge.com.

• Teachers from the Gulf join us as well. Even though on this show we feature teachers and resources from "elsewhere," it is always a welcomed moment when we can hear from our new friends from along the Gulf Coast.
• Oh, if you listen to the end, you'll catch Bill Fitzgerald who had just put up Voices on the Gulf hours before this webcast.

If you haven't joined us at Voices on the Gulf and at Youth Voices, please consider joining now. These are the best ways for keeping up with the work of this community of teachers represented on this podcast this fall.

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

61:31 minutes (14.08 MB)

read more

Inspired by a number of discussions at the Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning in Madison Wisconsin,  we consider the process of transitioning from a proprietary learning management system such as Blackboard to an open source system such as Moodle.
29:40 minutes (13.58 MB)

read more

The series of podcasts about the Gulf oil spill that we started at the beginning of June continues on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers.

We are joined by Alicia Blair a 5th grade science teacher from Mississippi who has been an important voice on many of these podcasts this summer.

It was also a delight to listen to Ann Dobie, author, professor, and former Writing Project Director from Louisiana.

 

Ann Brewster Dobie taught at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette for thirty-eight years, where she is now professor emerita of English. She directed graduate studies in rhetoric and the university’s writing-across-the-curriculum program. She is the author or coauthor of six college writing textbooks and author of numerous articles on literature and composition. She is the editor of Something in Common: Contemporary Louisiana Stories, Uncommonplace: An Anthology of Contemporary Louisiana Poets, and Wide Awake in the Pelican State: Stories by Contemporary Louisiana Writers. Ann received her doctorate in the teaching of writing from Columbia University.

Biography on http://anndobie.com Given our interest to work with teachers in the Gulf to collect the stories of students there, take a look at this description of Ann Dobie’s newest book, Fifty-Eight Days in the Cajundome Shelter, which was published in 2008.

Fifty-Eight Days in the Cajundome Shelter

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed thousands of homes, schools, and businesses across the Gulf Coast and changed the face of southeast Louisiana forever. However, nearly a hundred miles northwest of New Orleans, in Lafayette, Louisiana, a different story was unfolding. As men, women, and children waited on their roofs for rescue, executive director Greg Davis hurried to prepare the Cajundome in Lafayette as an emergency shelter.

The workers and volunteers in the Cajundome provided food, showers, and medical care to more than eighteen thousand evacuees that came to Lafayette. From the first busloads of newly homeless to the disasters caused by Hurricane Rita, “Fifty-Eight Days in the Cajundome Shelter” shares personal accounts of heartache and joy, tragedy and triumph. For the first time, here is a collection of the stories of the volunteers and evacuees. Their heroism, courage, and despair are etched into these stories as they endured the first few weeks in a hurricane-ravaged world.

Retold here is the bravery and leadership of Donald Williams as he took charge and led a convoy of handicapped and elderly to safety. Readers will also be captivated by the unforgettable story of the Prevost family as they climbed their way to the roof of their home and their heartbreaking journey to dry land on I-10. The author includes her own personal accounts of what really happened in the aftermath of Katrina and the bravery and selflessness of countless people who struggled to make a difference.

We are excited about the number of teachers who have joined us this summer for this exploration into how we can be good neighbors with our friends in the Gulf Coast. Al Doyle, a NYC teacher of gaming, joined us from the woods of a summer camp in Maine, and a new teacher Rebecca from Pennsylvania, had some things to say as well.

Some of the things to listen for in this podcast are some of the reasons we have been working with Bill Fitzgerald at FunnyMonkey to build an extension of our Youth Voices site. Two quotes from this podcast help define our mission for Voices on the Gulf:

I think sometimes when your there at that Ground Zero, if I can borrow that phrase, it's a little overwhelming. But I talked with several people and got together with our [Writing Project] director, and we just had a real brainstorm. And we went back again to our experience with Katrina. What did we end up doing? Not that we ever planned any of these things. It was more the spontaneous improv sort of thing. So we went back and we looked at the things that had been successful, and thought about what we would like to do for the oil spill. This time planning, with the goal being: We want to publish! We would like to do that this time.... This whole experience that we've had this summer in trying to brainstorm how to bring student voices out has really inspired us to take the initiative, instead of waiting until we see it through like we did with the hurricane, to make those efforts.
--Alicia Blair, high school science teacher and member of the Live Oak Writing Project, University of Southern Mississippi, Gulf Coast

In Louisiana after Katrina and Rita our [Writing Project] sites published any number of anthologies of student writing about those hurricanes, and about what it meant to live through the hurricanes, but even more so, through the clean up and the rebuilding. I have no doubt that that's going to happen again because our teachers always capitalize on those things which are happening in students' lives and their families' lives, and use those as sources of writing and a kind of catharsis. I have no doubt that it will happen.
--Ann Dobie, professor emerita of English, University of Louisiana, director of the Louisiana Writing Project State Network and former director of the National Writing Project of Acadiana

Also, please read:

• Matt Montagne's Copy of the email I sent to my school about VOG (August 2010)
• Gail Desler's Sample Parent Permission Letter (August 2010)

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

45:46 minutes (10.48 MB)

read more

Weeks of July 24 - August 6, 2010

read more

Our guests on this episode of  Teachers Teaching Teachers are:

• Kyle Meador, the Director of Education at Our School at Blair Grocery, New Orleans. To learn more about Our School at Blair Grocery, check out this video. Then click here to visit their photo slideshow. This is well worth your time! And while you are there, please contribute to their construction efforts. You'll find a donate button on the right side of the site.
   
• We met Kyle on Edutopia’s “official PBL Camp kickoff” this Monday. This was a webinar led by Suzie Boss, and it was “attended by more than 100 campers. If you missed the live event, you can view an archived recording, and/or download the slide presentation.” Suzie also joins us on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teacher. There was a lot of synergy between Edutopia’s Problem-Based Learning Camp and our webcast this summer. It was great to be a small part of this work. All of of the materials of this camp areopen to everybody and there is PBL wiki.
   
• On this episode, we also welcome two teachers from the Live Oak Writing Project which is on the coast in Mississippi. High school science teacher, Alicia Blair who had been with us the week before returns with a colleague, Stacey Ferguson who teaches 5th grade.
  
• Middle-school science and technology teacher, Jeff Mason joins us once again to give us his perspectives from Pensacola, Florida.

On this show, we talk about getting a website ready in time for the students on the Gulf Coast, to make it easy for them to share their stories, poems, photographs, essays, and cartoons with us. Bill Fitzgerald and his colleagues at FunnyMonkey pulled it off! Students are coming back along the Gulf Coast this week and next week. "Voices on the Gulf" is ready. We expect that student voices will dominate on this site eventually, but we invite you to join now, and add a discussion. What are you thinking about the BP oil spill? How will this event change your teaching?

Please plan to join us to plan curriculum and make connections with teachers in the Gulf. Browse over to http://EdTechTalk.com/live at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA every Wednesday in August./ World Times. We’ll see you then!

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

44:46 minutes (10.25 MB)

read more

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, Alicia Blair, a science teacher who lives near the beach in Mississippi, asked us to think of her the next time we pump gasoline into a gas-guzzling automobile. Later in the show her heart went out to an art teacher, April Estep, who lives 20 minutes from the site of Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch mining disaster. Casey Daugherty, a co-director of the Ozarks Writing Project, observed, "We'll think of April every time we switch the lights on."

Sandwiched between these ongoing conversations about how to respond to the BP oil spill and similar disasters such as the Big Branch disaster, we talked about how to raise teacher voice and how to push out audio and video on social networks like Twitter.

This summer our guests brought twitter and social networking to and from their local Invitational Summer Institutes of the National Writing Project. Paul Oh leads us in this discussion of how the face-to-face, intense summer work widens when social networks become part of the mix.

Our guests on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers were:

• Alicia Blair, Live Oak Writing Project in Southern Mississippi
• Casey Daugherty @caseydaugherty , Ozarks Writing Project in Missouri- @OzarksWP
• Steve Moore - @SteveJMoore , Greater Kansas City Writing Project - @GKCWP
• April Estep - @MsEstep , Coalfield Writers/Marshall University Writing Project in West Virginia - @MUWP
• Paul Oh - @poh , Program Associate, National Writing Project - @writingproject - @nwpsiteleaders

Learn more from these folks and others on this recent NWP resource page, Tweeting in the Summer Institute and Beyond:

Writing Project teachers have found Twitter to be a serious learning tool. Many sites across the country integrated Twitter into their summer institutes this summer, and teachers have built "personal learning networks"—groups of people who casually join together to communicate and collaborate on common topics—where they discuss serious educational issues.

44:32 minutes (10.19 MB)

read more

This week's newsletter, as did the last, features the recent Teachers Teaching Teachers shows where some very interesting conversations are taking place on a series of webcasts related to the Gulf oil disaster with the show hosts. Listen to their ideas for developing curriculum to deal with this tragedy and then plan to join them in a live show on Wednesdays at 9:00pm Eastern to contribute to the conversation.

The Instructional Designers are also staying busy during this summer period with their three shows being recorded and posted.

read more

In May 2009, the US Department of Education issued a meta-analysis and review of online learning studies that compared face-to-face, blended and online delivery modes, and found that: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.” Despite the caveats identified in the research, the conclusion, for some, was still: Online learning is better!Shanna Smith-Jaggars, Senior Research Associate at the Community Colleges Research Center challenges this assertion in her response to the meta-analysis  (July 2010). Jaggars more fully explores the comparison of online and face-to-face instruction and finds only 7 studies out of 51 can be used to shed light on this question. Of these 7, Jaggars concludes that there is no significant difference between learning outcome achievement in face-to-face or online courses for certain student populations. Sound familiar? Time to channel our energies into more rewarding directions, perhaps.. As Jaggars puts it in this interesting interview, “what we really need to be doing is spending more time and effort in trying to figure out what are the most effective instructional practices in both modalities”

31:16 minutes (14.31 MB)

read more

This the fourth week of a summer series in which we have focused Teachers Teaching Teachers on the BP Gulf Oil Spill. Our guests included:

• Matt Montagne, who has been collecting materials, such as: October 28th, 2010 TEDxOILSPILL Talks. The Google Doc that Matt can be found at http://tinyurl.com/voicesonthegulf - And stay tuned! There much more to come under the domain: "VoicesOnTheGulf." (We also eventually agreed on the common tags: "voicesonthegulf" and "edoilspill"
• Diana Laufenberg, a history teacher from Science Leadership Academy who joined us on this topic 3 weeks ago will try (from her family’s farm) to join us again.
• Natasha Whitton, one of the three teachers from the Southeastern Louisiana Writing Project two weeks ago, hopes to join us again
• Andrea Zellner, a biology and English teachers from the Red Cedar Writing Project in Michigan will be with us again!
• AND NEW to our webcast: Catherine Tibbs, a former high school English teacher who works for the Live Oak Writing Project in Mississippi joined us. (She is also invited colleagues who will be heard on future podcasts. Catherine wrote this on a Monday late in June :
   I don’t know if you know this or not, but oil reached the MS beaches this weekend. We had been fortunate so far to avoid this mess. From what I understand from the media, the manpower was not coordinated in the Gulf to skim the oil that is now reaching us. Isn’t that always the case?
  
• Also new to the podcast is Jeff Mason from Penscola, Florida, a biology and technology teacher. We met a Twitter, and we look forward to a continuing connection. (Jeff came on the webcast last week as well, so look for more from him on future podcasts.)

We hope you will be able to join us in this ongoing project. Help us know how to respond as teachers—and with our students—to this monster that will continue to reek havoc for weeks? months? to come!

Join us to talk about what's happening in the gulf 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.

50:32 minutes (11.57 MB)

read more

In a slight departure from our traditional format, we discuss several research papers that are being presented at the Association for Educational Communications and Technology Research Symposium being held in Bloomington, Indiana from July 20 - July 23. Jennifer Maddrell, presenting on the influence of Backchannel Communication on Cognitive Load, discusses her paper and several others in this 30 minute discussion.
36:19 minutes (16.62 MB)

read more

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers -- the third in our summer series on the Gulf oil failure -- Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim are joined by Chris Sloan and Andrea Zeller. We talk about building curriculum around the Gulf oil spill and other topics, wondering how to keep student self-motivated inquiry at the center of our work while also introducing topics such as the environment, art history, obesity, AP English, or the earthquake in Haiti and other current events.

• Chris Sloan teaches at Judge Memorial Catholic High School in Salt Lake City, and he is a member of the Wasatch Range Writing Project. He teaches digital photography, media studies and AP English. Chris, Paul and Susan and their students have been working together on a school-based social network, Youth Voices for the last six years.
   
• Andrea Zellner has been a frequent guest on TTT this summer, we are delighted to say! Andrea is a former high school teacher in Michigan, who taught both English and Biology. Currently Andrea works for the Red Cedar Writing Project.
   
• Susan Ettenheim teaches at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in New York City. Susan and Paul have been doing Teachers Teaching Teachers together for almost five years. Susan teaches computer arts, art, and digital photography, and she is the librarian as well. This year Susan is also teaching a Caribbean Art History course for the Virtual High School.
   
• Paul Allison teaches at the East-West School of International Studies in Flushing, Queens. He is also the Tech Liaison for the New York City Writing Project. Paul teaches English and he started a school/community garden this spring.

We hope you enjoy this conversation between four veteran teachers. Just as we build on each others ideas, we hope you build on ours and let us know what you are thinking in the comments below.

We invite you to join us each Wednesday this summer to listen to teachers from the Gulf and to hear how teachers are planning to bring these issues into their classrooms this fall.

Join us at http://EdTechTalk.com/live at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA Wednesdays / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times

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

41:57 minutes (9.6 MB)

read more

Welcome to the EdTechTalk (ETT) newsletter!

read more

Xiaojing Liu, Senior Research Analyst at Kelley Business School, Indiana University, joins us this week to discuss how to design effective online cased-based learning courses.  Drawing on her research into cased based-learning startegies used in an MBA program, Dr. Liu considers the benefits and challenges of case-based learning from both a student and faculty perspective.
39:05 minutes (17.89 MB)

read more

Obama seems to have missed another opportunity in a major address that he gave about the BP oil spill last month (June 15). Earlier he was right to call the Gulf Oil Disaster our environmental 9/11. Both are life-changing disasters that have many of us asking where we need to stop compromising.

On Teachers Teaching Teachers this summer, we are asking what needs to change in our schools and in our lives as teachers. We hope that Thomas L. Friedman’s comments in May 2010 won’t be the last word on the 9/11 comparison. “Sept. 11, 2001, was one of those rare seismic events that create the possibility to energize the country to do something really important and lasting that is too hard to do in normal times.”

On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we talked about what we can do now that we might not have done before this disaster or failure. This is the second of a series of shows we will be doing on the Gulf oil disaster.

In the previous podcast (TTT 204), we had a thoughtful, productive conversation with history teacher Diana Laufenberg about responses in our curriculum to the Gulf Oil Disaster.  One of her ideas was to set up Skype connections for our students with people in Gulf states to personalize and more deeply understand the impact of this ongoing disaster. To move this idea forward, we were joined by teacher-consultants from the Southeastern Louisiana Writing Project  — Carolyn Kirk, Tasha Whitton, and Ellen Steigman — on this podcast.

On this podcast, we wre also be joined by teachers Matt Montagne and Andrea Zellner — two of our favorite angry, young environmentalists!

Won’t you join us too? We will continue our conversations about what needs to change all summer on Teachers Teaching Teachers. We want to know what you are thinking. Join us in the chat room or get ready to join us on Skype at http://EdTechTalk.com/live at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA Wednesdays / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times

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

45:36 minutes (10.44 MB)

read more

This is the first in a series of TTT webcasts that we are doing this summer in response to BP's gushing oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. We are asking teachers from all over to join us each Wednesday evening this summer to put together a curriculum that will help our students build their own responses to the human, animal, and ecological devestation that has been happening every day since April. Incredibly, this "spill" promises to continue wrecking damage into the fall and winter.

Diana Laufenberg, a teacher at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, started us in this series of shows with a the powerful, clear-eyed stance of a history teacher commited to helping her students find their own answers to "How does this go on?" Diana's descriptions of a project in which her students made infographics this spring will inspire, and her ideas for connecting her students to students in the Gulf will make you want to join us in this endeavor. We also spoke to a math teacher, Matthew, from Pennsylvania.

Diana Laufenberg ( @dlaufenberg and Living the Dream ) is a history teacher at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. On the school’s website, she is described as “a nomad.”

Diana is a true life-long learner. She currently works with 11th grade students at SLA. Experiential education is an integral part of her educational pursuits taking students from the classroom to the real world and back again. Before finding her way to Philadelphia, she was an active member of the teaching community in Flagstaff, AZ where she was named Technology Teacher of the Year for Arizona and a member of the Governor’s Master Teacher Corps.

In the second and fourth webcasts in June, podcasts of which will be available later this week, we were privilidged to have teachers from the Gulf join us. We are working to find a place for all of us to contribute resources, connections, and ideas. On this webcast we talk about the possibility of connecting in some way through the Learning Network of the New York Times. (See "The Gulf Oil Spill in the Classroom.") Another possibility is for some of us to work with Suzie Boss and the teachers who have signed up for Edutopia's Project-Based  Learning Camp, which will start in the middle of July (although it's now closed to new participants). Also Matt Montagne started this Google Doc to begin collecting our thoughts, resources and plans.

Please enjoy to this podcast. Diana gets us off to a great start on this journey! And please plan to join us this summer 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA Wednesdays / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times.

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

46:19 minutes (10.6 MB)

read more

For this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we asked Suzie Boss to come on to help us have a conversation with:

• an amazing young high school student who has developed his own project-based learning by creating info-graphics.
• a dynamic teacher who has been working all year to help open a new public school in East Brooklyn.

We learned a lot, both about visualizing information and about integrating technology into a new, alternative school.

Michael, Amazing Student
Chris Sloan joined us with one of his amazing students, Michael, from Judge Memorial High School in Salt Lake City. Michael has a blog called Graph the Info.

Click on this image to see a recent post where Michael explains his creative process:

Charlie, Dynamic Teacher
We were also joined by Charlie Freij a teacher we meet in the New York City Writing Project’s Advanced Summer Institute last year. Charlie has been working this year to create a new school, East Brooklyn Community High School, in Canarsie. And his students have been using Youth Voices.

East Brooklyn Community High School is a small, academically rigorous high school that is committed to preparing students for college, meaningful employment, healthy personal and family relationships and participation in the life of their communities. East Brooklyn Community High School is a transfer school that is designed to help students who have fallen behind in credit accumulation get back on track and earn a high school diploma. East Brooklyn Community HS is a collaboration between the DOE and SCO Family Services; our curriculum and programs build on SCO’s comprehensive range of neighborhood and community based services that sustain families and children. The academic program will utilize innovative and project based instructional strategies that prepare students to pass Regents exams and develop the skills needed for post secondary options.

We hope you enjoy this podcast, and that you will join us each Wednesday this summer as we develop curriculum together that will address the BP Gulf Oil Atrocity.

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

58:46 minutes (13.45 MB)

read more