I’ve been tagged by Murcha for a meme challenge. Here are the rules:

• Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
• Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
• Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
• Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce

That’s a big question – what are you passionate about teaching your students?! I want them to love learning and I want them to feel empowered to make changes. I see Web 2.0 as a pathway to both those goals. Yesterday I spent the morning with a group of 1st graders from one of our semi-rural sites, Franklin Elementary School, a small (about 500 K-6 students) site on our district’s outskirts . To get to the school, you actually drive through a historic cemetery. Less than half the students in this classroom have Internet access at home.

The purpose of my visit was to connect this group of students to a group of 1st graders in Edmonton, Canada, for a Read Around the Planet videoconference. I was too busy working the remote control to take any photos. Fortunately, a 7-year-old artist named Giovanni captured the interactivity of the event with the sketch below, which he graciously presented to me at the end of the conference.

It is my hope (passion) that in the years to follow much of the time Giovanni and his classmates spend inside the four walls of the classroom will be spent connecting, exploring, learning, and creating beyond those four walls – much like the scene depicted above.

I am tagging Steve Hargadon, Monica Edinger, Janine Lim, Larry Ferlazzo, and Mathew Needleman, whose work/passions have already inspired me.

Thanks to a post in the NCTE Talkies listserv this morning by Nancy Patterson, I visited (revisited) high school CyberEnglish teacher, Dawn Hogue’s blog. I’m very glad that Dawn has posted the podcast of her recent interview (Part 1) with Professor Susan Antlitz about the importance of technology as a means of engaging student writers and “keeping their writing alive.”

I’ll be thinking about Dawn and other great teachers, who like Dawn “know things,” when I sit down tonight- after the Academy Awards – to read Time Magazine’s feature article How to Make Better Teachers.

Image from http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1713174-1,00.html

I really like the way the CTAP4 folks have organized resources for learning about and teaching all aspects of digital citizenship. They’ve included links to PowerPoints, workshop wikis, and even this wonderful poster. I think much of the credit for this valuable website goes to at&t’s Linda Uhrenholt.

I also appreciate Doug Johnson’s sharing his Cyberbullying and How to Avoid It student guide and poster – and Nancy Willard’s willingness to allow him to incorporate information from her website.  Doug will send the Word version to educators wanting to adapt the guide to meet their school or district’s guidelines.

And for our elementary students, I like McGruff’s Shrink the Cyberbully activity.

OK, in appreciation of all who are contributing resources to promote digital citizenship, I have one to give.  Many of the teachers and administrators attending my iSafety workshop ask for additional explanations of some the terminology that comes with Web 2.0.  I’ve been working with our district webmaster, who co-teaches the iSafety workshop, on developing a Cyberspace Glossary.  I can send the Word version to anyone who wants to tailor it for their own site.

I’m still reflecting on yesterday’s article in the Sac Bee about French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s controversial mandate that all 5th graders “adopt the memory of one of the 11,000 Jewish children in France killed in the Holocaust, learning about the selected child’s background and fate.” And following that article, today’s article on UC Davis students attending a conference to learn what they can do to stop the genocide in Darfur. These two projects involve students from ages 10 through adult. Is there a minimum age level for teaching about genocide?

The above articles are coming on the heels of a recent Teachers Teaching Teachers Skypecast during which someone in the chat room (Mr. Mayo?) introduced the Many Voices of Darfur blogging and wiki project, an invitation for students to make their voices heard to a worldwide audience.

Apparently, students as young as 3rd grade will be participating in this project and posting to the blog for 48 hours on March 4.

In my school district, I think many 5th grade teachers introduce the word “genocide” in 5th grade, as they delve into the unit on Columbus’s arrival to the “New World,” but without the availability of primary source documents such as those that tell of the last hours of individual Jewish children removed from Paris to extermination camps.

Last week I visited an elementary school library that happened to have on display 4th graders’ California Mission projects, including models (parent-done, I’m pretty sure) and some tri-fold displays (which also looked parent done). Kind of took me back to my 4th grade days. However, I’m still thinking about the tri-fold, I believe on Mission San Juan Capistrano, that included the statement “the local Indians were friendly and happy to work.” Maybe 4th graders are too young to learn about the government sanctioned genocide of California Indians, but I suspect that 4th graders at this school will end their year without a clue that “missionization” was NOT mutually beneficial.

But again I ask, at what age do we introduce students to “genocide”?

“While teachers are concerned about this lack of participation in classroom talk, they are also often relatively accepting of these quiet students who don’t pose a discipline problem, who turn in homework on time, and in general, get passing grades.“

I am pulling a few quotes from Carol Tateishi’s article Taking a Chance with Words, which she has published with Rethinking Schools. Carol shares insights from her own background of growing up Asian (Japanese-American) in a post World War II era as she observes through recent visits to San Francisco Bay Area high school classrooms “the lack of participation by students of Asian descent in the oral language activities of the class.”

In interviewing Asian-American students, she found four shared qualities:

• Oral Language tends to be used functionally
• Speaking publicly about one’s problems is discouraged
• That restraint in talking is valued
• You don’t talk about feelings or personal experiences

Yet as teachers, we commonly share a very different set of beliefs:

• Oral language can be used to negotiate meaning
• Risk-taking in talk is valued
• Speaking in class increases engagement
• Classroom dialog deepens learning

Carol points out that there is more at stake than “better learning of the curriculum.” Her concern is how the lack of strong verbal skills impacts future career paths for many Asian-Americans. “It mattered in the 1940s and matters again today if Asian-Americans have the words and voice to speak up for themselves and their communities. It matters if we have lawyers, writers, activists, educators, business leaders, elected officials, and ordinary citizens who understand the power of language and use it”

I will be passing this article on to colleagues whose class rosters include Asian-Americans. As Carol Tateishi points out: it’s easy to overlook the needs of students who seemingly pose no problems.

I’m in my second Web 2.0 Un-conference session: An Overview of Vyew, a Flash-based collaborative workspace that allows conference calls, chatting, threaded discussions, etc. Vyew = “instant workspaces.” The setup for Vyew has been researched and supported by Dr. Henry Lim, a Ph.D. at Stanford, with an ongoing evaluation of e-learning resources at the center.

Here are some Vyew features and concepts:

• promotes active responses – which could, for instance, play out as students synchronously responding to and agumenting a PowerPoint as teacher is presenting.
• Vyew is highly visual, which enhances memory coding in brain (hey, that connects with Hall Davidson’s presentation)

We’ve looked at some pretty amazing examples of med school students working on a PBL task. Students can work on same page, or on separate pages and then sync back up later to share compare. The developers are fine-tuning right now the ability of the instructor to unsync/sync projects to make it easier to track individual student’s input.

The question about control over “malicious deletion” is being addressed. A = think about the permission settings – collaborator vs. viewer, for instance.

Compared to a wiki, which is linear, Vyew is contextual, visual, and non-linear. And the concept mapping tools look very good. And wait, you can pull Auto Cad files in too. Oh, and upload videos.

I’m here in San Francisco at the Web 2.0 Un-Conference that Steve Hargadon energetically and collaboratively put together. The announcement to join the conference came through the Classroom 2.0 ning listserv, with a link to the conference wiki.

Here’s Steve’s overview of Web 2.0:

• Anyone can contribute – and make a difference
• It’s an historic change – it’s a world in which our contribution of material is as significant as our ability to consumer information
• Amazon.com good example of how things have changed: i.e., readers’ ability to add a review. Active example of Web 2.0
• Difference from receiving material to contributing to the web
• “When you write, everybody can hear you” – Quote from participant Andy Pass
• Web 2.0 conversations help refine and improve thinking

Heading off for a discussion of Web 2.0.