EduCon 2.9

We see this conversation as a welcoming party. We would like to show our colleagues the work we have been doing on Youth Voices, and we’d like to invite each of them to join us if it makes sense.

Youth Voices is a school-based social network that was started in 2003 by a group of National Writing Project teachers. We merged several earlier blogging projects. We have found that there are many advantages to bringing students together in one site that lives beyond any particular class. It's easier for individual students to read and write about their own passions, to connect with other students, comment on each others work, and create multimedia posts for each other. Further, it's been exciting for us to pool our knowledge about curriculum and digital literacies.

Four of the facilitators of this conversation are active members of a study group supported by the New York City Writing Project. We use an open study group on P2PU, and along with other teachers, we are developing a system of 60 Challenges, Tasks and Badges on P2PU that is totally open for any student or teacher to use, edit, or clone. We will also be joined in a Hangout by Youth Voices co-founder, Chris Sloan from Salt Lake City, Utah.

Youth Voices is much more than a website or a social network. We are also a welcoming community of teachers who have been planning online curriculum together for a decade. We would like to invite interested colleagues at EduCon 2.5 to join us!