New Journalism

Here are 10 or 11 reasons for joining us on Teachers Teaching Teachers https://teachersteachingteachers.org on Wednesday evening, October 14th at 9E/8C/7M/6P.

Kiran Chaudhuri, Harvest Collegiate High School, New York, New York

Paul Hankins, Silver Spring High School, Sellersburg, Indiana

Jessica Hernandez-Speer, P.U.L.S.E. High School, Bronx, New York

Janet Ilko, Health Sciences High School and Middle College, San Diego, California

Anna Maine, Berkeley High School, Berkeley, California

Natalia Navarro, Orange Cove High School, Orange Cove, California

Dawn Reed, Okemos High School, Okemos, Michigan

Sam Reed, The U School, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Chris Sloan and Bryan Jeffreys, Judge Memorial Catholic High School, Salt Lake City, Utah

Caleb Wohlust, Endeavor Academy High School, Centennial, Colorado

We are building what danah boyd describes as "networked publics" with our students on Youth Voices https://youthvoices.live/books and NowComment https://nowcomment.com/groups/literature

Networked publics are publics that are restructured by networked technologies. As such, they are simultaneously (1) the space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imagined collective that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice. Networked publics serve many of the same functions as other types of publics – they allow people to gather for social, cultural, and civic purposes and they help people connect with a world beyond their close friends and family. While networked publics share much in common with other types of publics, the ways in which technology structures them introduces distinct affordances that shape how people engage with these environments. The properties of bits – as distinct from atoms – introduce new possibilities for interaction. As a result, new dynamics emerge that shape participation.  

Later in the same article, boyd describes the affordances of digital discourse. Is this what is happening in our video-conferenced classrooms? We have the tools, experience, and commitment to build more powerful environments for learning on Youth Voices and NowComment:

The content of networked publics is made out of bits. Both self-expressions and interactions between people produce bit-based content in networked publics. Because of properties of bits, bits are easier to store, distribute, and search than atoms. Four affordances that emerge out of the properties of bits play a significant role in configuring networked publics: 

• Persistence: online expressions are automatically recorded and archived. • Replicability: content made out of bits can be duplicated. • Scalability: the potential visibility of content in networked publics is great. • Searchability: content in networked publics can be accessed through search. 

danah boyd. (2010). "Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances,Dynamics, and Implications." In Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (ed. Zizi Papacharissi), pp. 39-58.

It's amazing to see the different pieces of work happening in our network. We will share what our students are doing and what we are beginning to imagine they can do together on Youth Voices and NowComment.

Next week, TTT https://teachersteachingteachers.org returns to our regularly scheduled meetings on Wednesday evenings at 9E/8C/7M/6P with a special guest, Katherine Schulten.

This week we are taking a break from being on camera, and we are meeting tonight, Tuesday evening, September 29th at 9E/8C/7M/6P on NowComment during the debate. We hope that you can join us here with your thoughts: WATCH LIVE: The First 2020 Presidential Debate - Special Coverage & Analysis - PBS NewsHour. This will be an opportunity for the TTT network to meet in a different way. Note that we will not be meeting on Wednesday this week.

Annotating the 2020 Debates An invitation to comment on the live streams to build understanding and community

Sign up as a new user or Log in. 

Go to this Collection: 2020 Election in the United States of America and subscribe

Practice annotating a video that is not live by commenting on Frontline’s The Choice 2020: Trump vs. Biden 

Watch and add your comments and replies on Tuesday evening, September 29th at 9E/8C/7M/6P. Join us here: WATCH LIVE: The First 2020 Presidential Debate - Special Coverage & Analysis - PBS NewsHour 

See more.

Katherine Schulten, from the New York Times Learning Network STUDENT VOICE: 100 Argument Essays by Teens on Issues that Matter to Them + RAISING STUDENT VOICE: 35 Ways to Help Students Write Better Argument Essays

Join in a conversation with Katherine Schulten about her new books on TTT https://teachersteachingteachers.org this coming Wednesday evening, October 7 at 9E/8C/7M/6P

We invite you to join a group of National Writing Project teachers who have built 10 worlds in Minecraft for your students. Join the conversation with these world-builders on Thursday evening at https://teachersteachingteachers.org at 9E/8C/7M/6P.

(NOTE: We will not be meeting on Wednesday evening like we usually do. Instead, we'll be meeting on Thursday.)

Joe Dillion (@onewheeljoe) will lead the conversation with David Barel, Christina Cantrill (@Seecantrill), Matthew Farber (@MatthewFarber), and Marina Lombardo (@MarinaLombardo5) and YOU!

All are invited to participate in this conversation no matter your Minecraft chops! Also, feel free to bring your family's Minecraft expert with you as well.

Please plan to come to learn more about this new English Language Arts Pact that was was created in partnership with the National Writing Project (@writingproject) as a way for students to explore the setting, character, dialogue, and other aspects of writing in the open world of Minecraft Ed (#MinecraftEdu). We hear more about these 10 new lessons that can be found on their blog post: 

Teach Writing with the New English Language Arts Pack https://msft.it/6010TtXNQ.

In an effort to inquire into the world-building possibilities that Minecraft offers English Language Arts educators and young writers, teachers of the National Writing Project network have created 10 writing lessons related to world-building. These activities invite youth to play with the connections between creative writing and creative gaming. Setting in Narrative Writing: Explore the desert and imagine story possibilities. Characters All Around: Meet three characters and create one of your own. Diving for Dialogue: Help a group of people stranded on an island recover resources from a shipwreck, then write a dialogue. Exquisite Corpse: Learn about a century-old surrealist game, then write and play in this world. 6 Room Poem Maze: Tour a maze while writing about a powerful image to get practice with poetics. This I Believe: To help in the writing of a “This I Believe” essay, study mentor-texts from the popular NPR essay series and build objects that represent beliefs. Where I’m From: Inspired by the poem, “Where I’m From,” by George Ella Lyon, explore digital spaces that illustrate stanzas written by youth, then write your own stanzas and illustrate them. Conflict in Stories: Tour a scene with a few conflicts to think about story ideas and imagine resolutions. Narrative in Perspective: The mayor of a troubled village needs your perspective on some difficult issues. Your report will help her set things right. Settings for Stories: Tour four different environments while you answer questions that fiction writers use to engage in world-building. These lessons were built with the help of educators interested in thinking about the question, “What if lesson-planning had a second step: world-building?” Each was imagined as a playful interpretation of a concept familiar in English Language Arts, and each asks players to write and build in different ways. Young writers from the Denver Writing Project not only helped test the activities, but a few of them also lent their Minecrafting expertise and aided in the construction of the worlds.

 We look forward to seeing you on Thursday evening, September 24th at 9E/8C/7M/6P. We'll post the link to the Zoom conference at https://teachersteachingteachers.org 

Come play with the new profile features on Youth Voices https://youthvoices.live and make a plan for inviting your students to create a predictable, safe place online that they control for themselves.  

Join colleagues from around the country who are already using Youth Voices or are planning to this fall. Find the link to jump into our conversation at Teachers Teaching Teacher https://teachersteachingteachers.org tonight, Wednesday, September 16 at 9E/8C/7M/6P.

Anna Maine (Berkeley), Chris Sloan (Salt Lake City), Jessica Hernandez-Speer (Bronx),  Kiran Chaudhuri (NYC) & Natalia Navarro (Orange Cove, CA) are launching their students on the NEW Youth Voices, and you can too. 

Just copy your roster to this datasheet, and we'll have your students up and running within hours: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FDwAl8i6Ai_nGzdLUY3x7QjpFR0VLx7rtxc3_2vylfA/copy OR have your students complete this easy form: https://forms.gle/BtdVvZ1LHinQcrBk9

What is a Youth Voices profile? How might they be used by students in today's uncertainties?

Here's a list of metaphors we Jessica Hernandez-Speer and I started to describe a Youth Voices profile to our students.

It can be your personal, online

locker (where you can put video, audio, images and text that are important to you)

homeroom (where you stay connected with your Youth Voices connections)

home base (where you come back to re-focus)

home page (all of the work you’ve put on Youth Voices will be organized here)

headquarters (where you can find the resources to answer all of your questions

bat cave 

fortress of solitude

room of your own

clean, well-lighted place (where you can explore your own thoughts and writing)

place online like a YouTube channel/Instagram page/Facebook feed (for school, of course

We want you to set up your Youth Voices profile. We’ll show you the basics, and a few tools, and then you’re on your own!

Youth Voices Setup Assignment

Anna Maine has taken it to the next level with a detailed and video-enhanced set of instructions for students that include:

PART ONE: Setting up your profile PART TWO: Setting up your Digital Journal PART THREE: Writing your first comment

You should come to Teachers Teaching Teachers this week, on Wednesday evening, Sept. 9th at 9E/8C/7M/6P if you:

Helped create Youth Voices in 2003. There are some new tricks!

Have always wanted to know more about Youth Voices. There's never been a better time to give your students a place to hang-out, mess around, and geek out as Youth Voices provides!

Have used Youth Voices for blogging over the past few years, and would like to take it to the next level. Collaborative publishing and multimedia tools abound on the site!

Just want to get your students out of their own bubble. We are connecting with new schools every week from around the country!

Need the practical how-to's to be answered. We are going to get the Judge Memorial seniors set up and ready to go. You'll see how we can do it for your students too!

In Coming on Center (1981), James Moffett calls for students to be given what he describes as “an emotional mandate to play the whole symbolic scale, to find suspects and shape them, to invent ways to act upon others, and to discover their own voice.” For me, "Teaching the Universe of Discourse" (Moffett, 1968) has always been the goal for any curriculum, and providing spaces for youth to play across as much of the digital universe of discourse as possible has been our guiding light on Youth Voices https://youthvoices.live.

This summer, I've been building new places and refurbishing underutilized spaces for students to live inside of Youth Voices. I think we can look to Youth Voices to answer recent questions from colleagues on Teachers Teaching Teachers about how -- in these times -- to give our students opportunities be themselves and how to provide them with the tools they need to write for themselves, with each other, and for each other. 

In this meeting of Teachers Teaching Teachers https://teachersteachingteachers.org we'll be talking about how you might use some of the affordances of Youth Voices to help your students to build knowledge and develop online conversations with each other about the things they care about. 

We will talk about how we can make these tools for writing and learning available to your students on Youth Voices:

The use of a private group that includes updates and forums (threaded discussions).

There is also our recently updated profile pages that include updates and messages, and many ways to connect with other youth.

We will talk about the use of Wordpress Docs which can be private documents or wiki-like collaborative spaces for groups to compose together. 

I would also like to consider Discussion Posts with a focus on Blocks an innovative and powerful creation tool that has changed Wordpress from a blogging tool to a multimedia, digital publishing tool over the past few years. 

And we can talk about the ability to co-author posts now.

Comments is another important tool on the Wordpress toolbelt. 

With each of these tools we can talk about where the work gets published and who gets to see it. There are many privacy and group-only publishing features on Youth Voices that are recent innovations.

Join TTT https://teachersteachingteachers.org this Wednesday at 3pm PT/6pm ET where we’ll talk with Lisa Kay Solomon and Sam Ball about how we can bring the 2020 elections into our classrooms in these highly partisan times. (NOTE EARLIER TIME)

Lisa Kay Solomon will share with us the story of how she and her colleagues at the Stanford d.school developed the resource Vote by Design, “a non-partisan learning experience designed to promote civic engagement and agency among all voters.” Filmmaker Sam Ball is one of the founders of Citizen Film. Sam’s film American Creed (2018) features a “range of citizen-activists striving to realize their own visions of America’s promise across deep divides.” 

Given the uncertainties surrounding going back to school this fall, we’re also curious how Lisa and Sam envision teachers using their resources. Join us as they help us think of ways to design their learning experiences to work in face-to-face, hybrid, and/or completely online settings.