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Archive for the 'NYCWP' Category

Blogs written in conjunction with the NYCWP Summer Invitational Blogging in the Classroom 2006

The Question of Research

Posted by Madeline Slovenz Brownstone on 21st January 2008

magnifyingHow will our students develop the habit of research? Not the work behind the dreaded research paper that sends them to the library in droves every six weeks for an assigned term paper, but research that is spontaneous, ongoing and comes out of an authentic desire to know. Research that is timely and relevant to the learner.

When I am curious about something that has caught my attention, I usually know where to go and I love the journey. I thumb through books, magazines, and newspapers and search the Net. Wikipedia is usually my first stop when seeking information on a concept I don’t get.

How does social networking fit into this scheme? Sometimes I bring up my ideas to my husband, who is a scholar and avid news wonk. Sometimes I share my questions with professional colleagues I know and distant fellow travelers on the Net. Lately I turn to Twitter. Tweets that crawl along the side of my browser often arouse my curiosity to follow up and research more. A few times I have tweeted a query and received guidance from the kindness of strangers and those I know in the face-to-face world.

When do students have the luxury of following their own curiosities? They are shoved from assignment to assignment. My students are in a program of study that requires a portfolio of three “research” papers based on ethical and social issues that arise from IT news. I love reading IT news. Well, it scared me that after two months of teaching the class few had a habit of reading the news. What to do?

I set up a blog and asked them, in their first post to write about what IT issues were bugging them. Their topics ranged from “RFID: Scary Advancements” to “Spoofing” to “Swiping our Info Away” and to questions around encryption security. Next they were asked to go back to their RSS feed readers that they had set up as instructed. It was time to start building the habit of reading the IT news and making connections to it. I told them to find IT news that caught their attention and share their point of view about it in the blog. They did that, and added snippits from the article along with a link back to the original. Blogging the news is a standing weekly assignment that is not formally assessed. There is no grade assigned for the blogs, no mark on their report card. It’s simply a habit that I would like to see them develop. It is sort of taking root. There are hundreds of posts on a myriad of topics.

My next challenge is to twofold: turning them on to how to follow through on further research around their passion in IT developments and how to craft their writing for the readership they desire to attract. You see, like their teacher, they are quite new to the blogisphere. They have not yet fully participated in regularly commenting on other’s blogs. They have not yet developed a following of active readers who participate in their ideas. That’s the next step. But it starts with personal research. I listened to a podcast on Teachers Teaching Teachers, “A Few Sides of the Research Elephant“. Paul Allison of the NYCWP hosts the show and has long been an inspiration to my teaching. He has the luxury of allowing his students to follow their passions through their freewrites. That leads to a course of personal research and rewrites that end up posted in student blogs. It’s a wonderful model. I guess my goal is to spark the place inside my students that allows them to find their passion within the constraints of the content I am obliged to guide them through this year and next. Then, to share with them how to start that journey through books, magazines, newspapers, the Web and making contact with humans who are in the worlds of their research. The Internet has brought all of that to my lap wherever I am–as long as there’s broadband to hook up to. What a wonderful world!

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Teaching Effective Writing

Posted by Madeline Slovenz Brownstone on 20th January 2008

When I heard Linda Christensen will be the keynote address speaker at the upcoming NYCWP Stack of BooksTeacher-to-Teacher conference, I ordered her book Reading, Writing, and Rising Up: Teaching About Social Justice and the Power of the Written Word on Amazon (http://tinyurl.com/yo7xmt). Hoping I’ll get some ideas on how to get my 7th Graders involved in taking a position on a cause. Since I teach technology, I want them to understand the collateral effects of all our new technologies on the environment. Ideally, they will be in communication with their peers around the world (perhaps through iEARN forums) and collaborate on gathering data about what is happening. Together, the students can organize and start to do something about raising awareness of the issues and taking steps towards solving the problems .

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The Ebb and Flow of Semesters

Posted by Madeline Slovenz Brownstone on 19th January 2008

Teen Talk LogoAs one semester comes to a close and I prepare to meet a new group of students I am filled with anticipation of how to improve my teaching methods and allow the students to develop their own personal learning networks vis a vis the Internet. I’ve been paying much more attention to teachers in Twitter and edubloggers lately–especially (Chris Lehman, Clay Burell, Jo McLeay, and David Jakes). I even revisited Facebook to see what all the buzz was about and friended a number of folks well worth following. I’ve participated in a spontaneous Quick-in, Quick-out international podcast while grabbing a bite to eat in the teachers room this week, made numerous Trailfire marks, been meeting face-to-face and tweeting with my fellow NYC Writing Project colleagues (follow NYCWP on Twitter), and intant messaging with Thalysia Knoppel, a teacher at our twin school in The Netherlands to get up to date on our twinning project, The Richness Within. What will it all add up to? How will my teaching change this term? What are realistic goals? I could go on and on. What’s the short list?

  • My 11th grade bloggers (Information Technology in a Global Society) will learn to write compelling posts that attract commentaries rather than hit-and-run traffic.
  • My 8th graders will adopt blogging and commenting in the elgg as a preferred mode of expression over MySpace banter.
  • My 7th graders (have yet to meet them) will engage in an authentic collaboration with their age-mates in Australia (Students of Jo McLeay).
  • My mixed-grade after-school YouthCaN group’s wiki will transform into an international collaboration.

As I learn to use the tools to their best advantage, my students will follow. First I need to bring shape to my PLN. Any advice on aggregating everything I read into one easy to reach place?

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Making use of Podcasts in the ITGS Classroom

Posted by Madeline Slovenz Brownstone on 17th November 2007

RSS+MP3MP3 players are ubiquitous in the high school environment, but believe me, the kids in my school are not tuning in to podcasts. Are they anywhere? I’d love to hear some stories. Anyway, even though the NYCDOE forbids students to carry cellphones and music players, at class change kids are quick on the draw to pop their tell-tale white ear buds in at the drop of a hat to catch a tune while passing classes. There has been press about the educational uses of iPods.  Librarians throughout the NYC school system discuss on their listserv the uses of iPods in their school libraries.  But what does it take to get students to actually listen to podcasts?

I have a 30G video iPod with absolutely no music on it. Not sure what that says about me, but I am fond of listening to  select podcasts when I’m on the go.  I regularly listen to a number of IT podcasts. Cranky Geeks and Security Now are two of them that come to mind that I would like to share with my ITGS students. I hesitate because as listen to Security Now this morning I find myself pausing the podcast to Google the key terms discussed. It occurs to me, that’s what I want my students to do. I want them to be active participants in their own education. Oh how they love to ask questions during a mini-lesson. While listening to a podcast they can multi-task as they ask and answer their own questions while listening.

I can tell by classroom demeanor that my ITGS students are keenly interested in IT security. I think they would love the episode of Security Now that I listened to this morning. But would they? How long can someone sustain a interest in listening when there is so much that is new and unfamiliar? Each time Steve Gibson and Leo Leporte introduced a new product or concept in the show I was too often asking myself, “What’s that?”  What keeps me listening is that I Google the terms as I listen, and pause the pundits while I catch up enough to follow the thread of their conversations. Would my students take the time to do that? Would they enjoy it? I’m not sure. So today I made a Trailfire of my searching to be a companion to the podcast. (Trailfire is a mashup tool that allows the web surfer to leave virtual notes in the margins of the webpages she visits and store the trail of notes for later access or to share with others. It even allows a wiki feature to invite others to interject their notes into the “mother” trail.) I will ask my students to listen to the podcast  and follow along with Trailfire. Maybe then they will get hooked on this mode of learning.

Please share your experiences of using podcasts in the classroom.


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Multiculturalism: The Richness Within

Posted by Madeline Slovenz Brownstone on 7th January 2007

The project’s aim is to connect three secondary schools in the US and three secondary schools [in ]The Netherlands. The participating schools have a mixed and multi cultural school population. During the two-year project students and teachers will work and learn together in Twin-projects, as well as in collaborative setting in Learning Circles. The aim is to become aware of the richness within multi cultural (school) communities. The themes of the Learning Circles will be set by the participating schools within the domain of ‘a multicultural society’, identifying and building respect for differences and similarities. All learning activities are connected to the formal learning in schools and informal learning outside schools. To create ownership of learning the details within the framework of the project will be set in close collaboration with the participating schools, teachers and students. –twin schools | 2006-2007 | LC The richness within

My, how time flies! This project is upon us. Front and center. It seems like only yesterday that we met at the NYC iEARN offices to plan our Learning Circle, The Richness Within. Bob Hoffman from iEARN Netherlands presented Wendy Nelson Kauffman, Bridgette Francis and I with an opportunity to plan a two-year collaboration with schools in The Netherlands. I was to follow up with a multimedia introduction of myself. Must say, I have not done that, and the time is upon me. I will do that first thing, early this week. I’ll take this time tonight to blog about the project to get me focused.

The topic of the exchange is multiculturalism. There are three multicultural schools in the U.S. and three in the Netherlands that will participate:

What does it mean for each school to claim to be multicultural? At the Baccalaureate School for Global Education (BSGE) it would be odd to “not” be multicultural because we are in Queens, NY, likely one of the most polyglot areas in the U.S.A. I have been teaching in NYC schools for 11 years and never have I seen such cultural diversity before teaching at BSGE. Here, multiculturalism is taken for granted. When I met Wendy Nelson Kauffman from Metropolitan Learning Center in Bloomfield, CT, I learned that her school was designed to be a magnet school in order to provide an opportunity for a multicultural educational experience in an area where neighborhood schools reflect the racial make-up of those areas and tend to me mono-cultural. According to Bridgette, a teacher from College of Staten Island High School for International Studies, her school was created to break the stereotypical view that Staten Island is “white”. What does this all mean? Each school is multicultural–one is reflective of the community, one buses students in, and another designed to focus on the diversity of the area.

Well, the situations in the Netherlands’ schools will most likely present three more variations on the theme. According to Bob Hoffman, of iEARN Nederland there are “white” schools and “black” schools. Multicultural schools are a recent phenomenon. So goes the idea of the “liberal Dutch”. What does multicultural look like in the Netherlands? How does it compare to our U.S. schools? I predict that we will find as many differences among our U.S. schools, as we may in the Netherlands schools.

One of the ideas in our school’s mission statement says:

Our goal is to foster a spirit of imaginative, independent thinking
as we deepen our consciousness of global citizenship and respect
for other cultures. We believe that our school community,
through our thoughts and actions, can make the world a better
place. –Mission Statement

What will this exchange reveal about us? To what extent are we meeting the above stated goal? I wonder. What I hope to learn through this exchange is how students at our various schools understand the value of a multicultural experience. How much of their own personal identity is tied to a race, culture, religion, national origin?

I was born in the U.S.A. in New Jersey. Both sets of grandparents were immigrants. I was fortunate that they lived within a mile of my home and I got to know them all. I felt a closer kinship to my mother’s parents who were from the Netherlands and spoke “Dutch” around the house, especially when they were trying to be private. I knew my Dutch relatives. They would visit us, and in 1963 my mother took me to Holland. It was different on my father’s side. My father’s mother was from Slovakia and his father from Croatia. They were fluent in many European languages, and yet spoke none around the house. They didn’t display any pride in their heritage and there was a lot of anger about the communist take-over. When I asked my grandfather what nationality he was, he always answered: “It depends. After which war?” My grandmother was appalled when I wanted to visit her birthplace in 1972 and meet her sister and brother. She said: “Why do you want to go there? It’s all communist. They are peasants.” I went anyway, and in the end she was pleased to hear of my adventure. How does my family heritage shape me culturally? If I were a student in my school what would I say I was? When I am asked to think outside of “American” I simply think of my self as white European. So general. What does that say? I think it says a lot about the presumed “dominant culture” that I was born into. But what does that say about my identity?

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Garbage Land — Engineering the City

Posted by Madeline Slovenz Brownstone on 17th October 2006

~~Reflections of a teacher on the Future City Competition.

This week, I picked up a copy of Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte because I thought it might shed some light on the work I am doing with my 8th graders in design technology . The big question they are working on is: How does the design of a city’s infrastructures affect the quality of life for it’s citizens?  I’m started reading this morning and found a couple of key paragraphs to share with my budding engineers. On page 10 she introduces a measure of sustainability called “ecological footprint” a concept developed by Canadian regional planners William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel

“Basically, a foot print totals the flows of material and energy required to support any economy or subset of an economy (coffee drinking, for example), then converts those flows into the total land and water surface area that it takes to both provide those resources and assimilate their waste products.  For residents of densely populated cities, that surface area extends well beyond our borders, into the hinterlands.  We don’t grow much, and our water and energy come from afar. Measuring our  footprint, or any other footprint, isn’t necessarily about good and bad; it is about making informed choices.”

When my students start to build the infrastructures of their SimCity simulation they need to be thinking about the impacts that are outside the city and, unfortunately, outside the algorithms of this very smart and well designed game.

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Reading and Writing in the 21st Century for Middle-School Students: a proposed curriculum outline

Posted by Madeline Slovenz Brownstone on 18th August 2006

The Baccalaureate School for Global Education (BSGE) is a public middle and secondary school dedicated to the achievement of academic excellence and the development, in each student of a positive self-image, love of learning, respect for others, and reverence for life. We are committed to holistic education, i.e. the nurturing of the intellectual, social, physical, and creative development of each person. Our goal is to foster a spirit of imaginative, independent thinking as we deepen our consciousness of global citizenship and respect for other cultures. We believe that our school community, through our thoughts and actions, can make the world a better place.

Baccalaureate School for Global Education

After a summer of exploring blogs, wikis and podcasts, I cannot wrap myself around planning to teach computer keyboarding and apps as we have in the past. It is a skills class, but I propose we also align the learning experience to the vision of our school. (See the quote from our school’s vision statement above.) I can see no better way than jumping into the read/write web with our new 7th graders. How about calling our 7th grade elective “Reading and Writing in the 21st Century”? What doe that mean for us? With due respect to principal Stroud’s desire that all incoming 7th graders master keyboarding skills, I want to ask: Keyboarding? Typing? Typing what? In what context? I propose we wrap this course around not only developing proper keyboarding skills, but also pursuing burning questions by reading and writing in the global society, reading and collaboratively writing in Writely, reading and writing blogs, and also contributing to a British-based international wiki for students–Wikiville.

This course–formerly known as keyboarding and computer apps–is a skills-based introductory class taught every year as a 7th Grade elective. The class meets once a week for the entire school year.

I think that because computer technology is changing rapidly and constantly it is no longer tenable to teach software specific skills; we need to prepare our middle-school students to build on their current technological knowledge and experience to discover how they can become active self-learners in a world of read/write technologies. To gain proficiency one must develop the skills to be a self-learner.

We expect the students to be attentive to the MYP Design Cycle and the five areas of interaction in all technology-related learning. This class is the first opportunity for our incoming students have to experience the design cycle, so we will focus on the first stage–investigation. At this stage, the preliminary skills are related to collecting, analyzing, selecting, organizing, and evaluating information to help solve a problem (or create a product).

The objectives of the computer technology curriculum for this 7th grade elective are:

  • Students will understand and follow protocols for using BSGE computers.
  • Students will understand and follow protocols for Internet safety.
  • Students will have a basic understanding of the computer as a system and the LAN and Internet as complex systems that contain other computer systems.
  • Students will make a daily effort to improve keyboarding skills via an online tool.
  • Students will have basic understanding of how to use productivity software on the personal computer such as MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe PhotoShop.
  • Students will understand how to intelligently name and organize files on the LAN
  • Students will write using a collaborative web-based word-processing tool.
  • Students will learn about intelligent web searching, social bookmarking, tagging, RSS feeds, and podcasts
  • Students will research a burning question or problem by using not only print media but also Web-based services – webpages, social bookmarks, wikis, blogs, podcasts, vlogs and webcasts)
  • Students will learn to write articles on big questions that have common ground across large geographic boundaries, or simply to pursue what they are wondering about. and will be encouraged to engage in collaborative writing as they contribute to a worldwide student wiki (http://www.wikiville.org.uk)
  • Students will create a blog on the Internet in a a protected area predesignated for youngsters
  • Student will follow accepted protocols for using Creative Commons and Copyrighted materials
  • Students will record and publish their spoken word in a podcast.

Resources

  1. http://www.shambles.net/pages/learning/ict/web2edu/ a list of annotated links on using Web2.0 tools in education.
  2. http://edu.blogs.com/ a Scottish educator blogs on how Web2.0 tools/services aren’t just a gimmick
  3. http://www.shambles.net/pages/learning/infolit/library2/ an annotated list of links on implications of Web2.0 technology on libraries
  4. http://www.teachinghacks.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page a wiki for teaching hacks.

What do you think? Comment below.

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Intelligent Tinkering

Posted by Madeline Slovenz Brownstone on 11th August 2006

“To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering” –Aldo Leopold

Leopold is an ecologist.  Tinkering with the planet, directly and indirectly, has driven us closer to a point where there may be no turning back.  Can I teach my students to be intelligent tinkerers? Can they learn to appreciate that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts? Will they create a sustainable future?  Will my generation curtail the drive to manufacture mindless consumers and get back to the job of producing responsible products of technology that will serve this planet rather than destroy it? 

Reading “Productivism and the Product Paradigm in Technological Education” by Leo Elshof  (Journal of Technology Education, Vol. 17 No. 2, Spring 2006) is helping me rethink the overarching essential question for my 8th grade course in design technology this year.  Elshof is calling for tech ed teachers to orient students to think critically about the role of design with respect to society, culture, and environment. That lies at the heart of the IB MYP philosophy that uses the areas of interaction as lenses to focus content in the various disciplines. Areas of interaction are: 1) health and social education, 2) environment, 3) homo faber, 4) community and service, and 4) approaches to learning.  All five of these lenses can be used to guide the student of  tech ed to examine the implications of design for society and culture and also to consider the materials and modes of production and the ultimate re-manufacture or disposal at the end of the useful life of a product of technology.

This term we will be entering the Future Cities competition. The students will have the opportunity to design and plan for a sustainable environment. They will have to understand how systems of transportation, energy, water, sewers, safety, education, economics and more all work together to make a livable city and how those systems impact the environment.  How can they imagine such a future? It is difficult for middle school students to understand complex systems. Cripes, they hardly understand simple mechanics. They only have  a simple notion of systems — input | process | output | feedback — they haven’t yet internalized how the parts are interdependent. 

Before they can understand the urban infrastructure they need to internalize how parts all work together.  I will begin by giving them a practical activity in which they examine a mechanical toy. (It’s a trigger operated kind of thing. When you pull the trigger back a soccer ball on a platform spins.  Centrifugal force allows the parts of the ball to open to reveal a figure in the center.  When the trigger is released it snaps back into position.) First they’ll play with the toy and work in a team to infer how it works. Next they’ll draw the internal mechanism that they imagine is at work. At that point, they will be ready to take it apart. Once the screws are loosened, the parts all fall out onto the table. Students work in their teams to understand the parts and how they actually work together, diagram it and reassemble the system. If they loose any one of the parts, the system will not work. 

Whenever I poll my students at the beginning of my course, they always think that technology is beneficial and liberating.  My job is to allow them to discover what the benefits and drawbacks actually are. What are the trade-offs? Is technology liberating or constraining our lives? They will work in small teams for five months (Sept. through Jan.) to plan the more complex systems for their future cities. The overarching essential question they will be answering  this term is: What does technology offer?

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Surfing in the Rockaways, NY

Posted by Madeline Slovenz Brownstone on 28th July 2006

Play Video of Rockaway Beach, NY

I found this charming video by Bret Siler. It’s about surfing in February, but it gives you a good idea of what it’s like out here where I spend my summers. It makes it darn hard to sit at my desk and work, that’s for sure.

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Popcorn Conversation with Experts in Engineering

Posted by Madeline Slovenz Brownstone on 27th July 2006

icon for podpress  Planning Popcorn Conversation -1 [2:23m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1410)

I have been interested in some sort of engineering ever since the third grade. That was when the guidance counselor called my mother and me in for a meeting to inform us that the aptitude test I took indicated that I should become an engineer when I grow up. An image immediately came to my mind. I saw myself in a striped blue denim cap leaning out the window of a passing train tugging on a chain to toot the horn. Train engineer was the only kind of engineer I knew, and no one disabused me of that idea. That was 1956 when girls could only imagine themselves being teachers, secretaries, dental hygienists or nurses. Engineering wasn’t even mentioned. My mother was a nurse and although proud of her training was not working when I was growing up. I always knew her as a stay-at-home mom. An artist and super mom. I remember she was handy with tools. She could fix anything that broke. Her father was a self-taught carpenter and builder. He designed and built a number of houses in my hometown. As a result of being around my mother and grandfather Pete, I grew up just knowing how to use tools and never gave it a thought that this wasn’t “girls’ work”. I grew up and became a teacher. At this juncture, a teacher of design technology, sometimes called tech ed. I teach in NYC where most children grow up in apartments and the only person who fixes things with tools is the super. When students get to my class in the 7th and 8th grades they wide-eyed and bushy-tailed (does that have a bad connotation?) filled with awe and want to learn. It doesn’t get any better than that for teachers. I want to give them an opportunity to have conversations with experts in a ariety of engineering disciplines so yesterday, I registered a domain–popcornconversaton.org to plan a place for such talks.

A New WordPress Blog and Podcast Series is Born
The Popcorn Conversation will be an opportunity for experts, teachers and students to come together as partners to learn from each other and to construct an understanding of the human-built world. In this rapidly changing universe of scientific discovery, technological development and information processing, it is increasingly more difficult to know how to prepare today’s youth for the future they will inherit. The future we cannot adequately imagine nor predict. Initially (Fall 2006), Popcorn Conversation will be an adjunct to my 8th grade design technology class that I teach at the Baccalaureate School for Global Education, a public school in New York City that prepares all students to be candidates for the IB Diploma.

The overarching theme for my class is understanding urban infrastructures and designing future cities. That theme will help inform the choice of experts and help start the topics of conversations. The experts will come from the fields of urban planning, design, engineering, science and technology.

Why popcorn? Why not ping pong?
The name for this site came from something my principal said one day at our school’s morning meeting. Principal William Stroud (actually, we all call him Bill) announced that he would be visiting classrooms and that he would be looking for a number of things that were evidence of our inquiry-based teaching methods. One thing he said made me wonder. I wasn’t sure what I heard. Bill said, “When I go to your classrooms, I will see popcorn not ping pong.” I wasn’t sure I heard him right. I made a puzzled face hoping he would explain. Did my mind drift? It was early. Did I miss a connection? My mind associated popcorn and ping pong to two student activities at our school. We have a ping pong elective class and the 7th graders publish an underground newspaper called The Popcorn Kinda Weekly. What was the connection? I was missing something. So, I asked. Bill clarified what he was alluding to. Conversations. He wanted to see popcorn not ping pong. A popcorn conversation is one that moves along on it’s own steam. One idea leads to another, one connecting to the next in the natural way that ideas are discussed outside the
conventional classroom. Ping pong conversation is where the teacher lobs a question to the class and a student lobs the answer back to the teacher. Back and forth like a game of ping pong with the teacher controlling the ideas, and all ideas being filtered through the
teacher. Bill wanted to see popcorn not ping pong. I got it.

Back Story:
In the summer of 2005 the BSGE teachers participated in a Great Books Foundation workshop. The main style of communication in Great Books discussions is similar to popcorn conversation. The protocol is as follows:

  • in preparation discussants have read the same text and have reflected in their journal on an open ended question
  • the discussants have the text and their journals and sit in a circle with the teacher
  • the teacher has a map of the seating plan
  • the teacher asks an open ended question that is related to a passage all have read in advance (not the reflection question)
  • the members of the group jump in the discussion without having to raise their hand
  • the discussants yield to others when two or more jump in at once
  • the teacher keeps track of who speaks and the number of times each one participates
  • if it appears there is someone who is not jumping in, the teacher calls on that individual by name and asks them to read their response to the reflection question
  • the teacher controls when to end the conversation

Below is a preliminary podcast, a sound recording, an experiment in thinking live to the mike. I really need to figure out the logistics of all this. Last night I went live on World Bridges Webcast called “Teachers Teaching Teachers.” Dave, a teacher from Canada was on and encouraged me to go live with a Webcast rather than pre-recorded podcasts. He said it was actually easier than it seemed. I suppose, that is true to some extent. The fact that it is live keeps you from futzing around and doing re-takes to get it right. The coversation is also livelier. I think he is right.

Today I will meet with Laura Ventoso, a civil engineer who is currently woring on the 2nd Avenue Subway Tunnel project here in NYC. We will brainstorm this child and figure out how to involve engineers from a variety of disciplines. Check back here or there tonight for an update.

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