New Journalism

We’ve got some follow-up’s, and some room for new voices on this week’s Teachers Teaching Teachers.We’ve invited teachers who are new to Youth Voices to join us to talk about what they might be planning for the coming semester.

Also, Paul has invited several of his students on the show to explain more about gaming. These students were listening and in the chat room on EdTechTalk last week when we talked about gaming in schools with other teachers, researchers, and consultants. These student asked for a student-centered follow up. Come find out where gaming is in their lives, and let’s see what we can learn about bringing gaming into our curriculum this coming semester. If you know of a gamer, please invite him or her to join us as well! We’d love to include other students via Skype!

And if that’s not enough, we have invited George Haines, a 6th grade teacher back on the show to takl about a Twitter project he is about to launch. George was on TTT in August: Teachers Teaching Teachers #165 - 08.26.09 - Meet Lisa Dick and George Haines: Talking about research and diigo Recently George wrote us to say that he hasn’t given up on “video and self-directed learning via youtube.

I haven’t scrapped that platform yet, but I decided to try to use Twitter for self-directed learning first. It is so much more nimble of a platform, I figured it would allow for a more fluid discussion and more immediate feedback and clarification.I saw that you have a youthvoices account on twitter and I just started following it. My kids are almost ready to start tweeting out their questions and connecting to other kids as part of this “KidSourcing” project. My kids are 6th graders, but I have invited any classes in the ballpark to connect with my kids. We are connecting to kids in Tanzania (http://epicchangeblog.org/2009/10/21/the-twitterkids-of-tanzania/) and I am working out the involvement with schools in Peru, Brazil, China and a couple here in the old U.S. of A.

I don’t know how neatly our project meshes with what you are trying to accomplish with youthvoices, but I figured I would reach out and gauge  your interest in connecting.Here is the basic outline for the project:

The idea is to have kids search for answers from the crowd of kids with no help from the adults (aside from monitoring and guiding offline). The idea is to seek answers to “why” questions as opposed to “What” questions. For example, a question that a kid can simply Google like “when did the civil war start?” is a bad one, but a question like “WHY did the civil war start?” is a good one. Questions that start discussions, lead to independent research and sharing links fit the bill.

The idea would be to keep it loose and low impact- not a heavily dependent collaboration. I will probably tell my kids to post a new question each week and I will probably give them an arbitrary number of questions from other kids to help answer.For the first month we will work in depth on the project, then I hope to make it part of the routine when they come to the lab, meaning they login and check twitter for 5-10 minutes before we launch into whatever other projects we are doing at the time. video and self-directed learning via youtube.

I haven’t scrapped that platform yet, but I decided to try to use Twitter for self-directed learning first. It is so much more nimble of a platform, I figured it would allow for a more fluid discussion and more immediate feedback and clarification.I saw that you have a youthvoices account on twitter and I just started following it. My kids are almost ready to start tweeting out their questions and connecting to other kids as part of this “KidSourcing” project. My kids are 6th graders, but I have invited any classes in the ballpark to connect with my kids. We are connecting to kids in Tanzania (http://epicchangeblog.org/2009/10/21/the-twitterkids-of-tanzania/) and I am working out the involvement with schools in Peru, Brazil, China and a couple here in the old U.S. of A.

I don’t know how neatly our project meshes with what you are trying to accomplish with youthvoices, but I figured I would reach out and gauge  your interest in connecting.

We’re interested, and maybe you will be too.Join us at EdTechTalk at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA Wednesdays / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times

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