Scroll through the videos from the YouTube playlist above or click below to watch individual videos from our speakers at TEDxYouth@TheSchool on 11/19/11. All the speaker bios are on the website.

Don Buckley
Charles Wilson
Lucas Ward
Dickson Despommier
Shannon Durugordon and Kate Scheuermann
Charles Colten
Monica Louie
Mauricio Salgado
Sharon Unis
Ben Hirschfeld
Nonsequitur

Thank you to all who presented, attended, sponsored and organized this second annual TEDxYouth@TheSchool!

http://teach21.theschool.columbia.edu/

http://twitter.com/teach21c

As I wrote in my last post, Teach21 was a professional development institute for 21st Century educators organized by faculty and administrators at The School at Columbia University. Every day there was a keynote speaker (Sree Sreenivasan, Howard Gardner, A.J. Jacobs, Karen Cator) and many half-day and full-day concurrent offerings.

Thursday, I offered a session about "Social Networking and Literacy." We started the 2.5 hours together with a discussion about literacy. I used to think literacy was just the reading and writing of text. Nowadays literacy is about learning how to comprehend/research/navigate/communicate/cite/re-mix/share all sorts of media.

We started off the session with a conversation about the new literacies and looked at a couple of sources:

• Wikipedia page for "New Literacies": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_literacies
• NCTE Position Statement: http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/21stcentdefinition
• 21st Century Literacies: http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/
• Henry Jenkins's "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century": http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/files/working/NMLWhitePaper.pdf

Then I showed a couple of projects where students publish individual and group work online and collaborate via shared access, commenting, hyperlinking, and other interactions. We looked at The Independent Reading Site that I set up with Marisa Guastaferro three years ago and the To Kill a Mockingbird book groups set up by Eve Becker for her 8th grade English classes. Both projects are described in this post: http://karenblumberg.com/social-networking-and-literacy-on-2511-at-600

Then we looked at ways to set up similar projects with other available technologies.

• You don't have an in-house Drupal photo server? Use Flickr, Shutterfly, Picasa and work with privacy and permissions.
• You don't have an in-house Drupal video server? Use YouTube and consider public/private settings.
• You don't have an in-house Elgg social network? Use Edmodo, Schoology, Facebook, Ning, Moodle, Twitter  to set up gathering spaces online.
• You don't have Google Apps? Use Shelfari or Goodreads to discuss literature.

Resources from this and other Teach21 sessions are here: https://sites.google.com/a/theschool.columbia.edu/teach21-resources/

The School's 7th grade Spanish teacher, Erin O'Leary, wanted her students to do a "Mi Casa" project that replicated MTV Cribs. Students were asked to mix together audio, images, and/or video and create a show using either GarageBand or iMovie.

I reinforced that students had to properly locate freely shared images using Google's Advanced Search Feature and cite properly in some sort of image bibliography.

Two examples of final projects are below: