Sneak Peek into Cooking into Cultures Blog

My project is a blog about an International Dinner Club titled Cooking into Cultures.  The blog has two goals beyond class goals:

1. Share what our dinner club has learned and done because it's been a life changing and wonderfully fun experience and
2. connect with others around the world who love cooking, eating and learning about other cultures.  

I hope we meet new people, gain new recipes, and insights into the role of food in their culture.  It's started now to find some people to read it!

The blog is open but if you just want a quick view the first two postings are below.

Cooking into Culture Dinner Club - An Innocent Beginning Blog post1
 

For the last six years I’ve been part of a wonderful experiment to learn more about other cultures through food. Four couples decided to meet 6 - 8 times a year to enjoy a dinner based on a theme of a country or region. What has evolved has been an adventure. We’ve experienced collaboration, generosity, friendship, extraordinary food and a window into a deeper understanding of ourselves and other people.

Our beginning was unremarkable in its inception. We met as parent volunteers, for our sons’ scout troop, with eight sons among us. When one of our youngest was accepted to attend school in Japan through the Rotary Youth Exchange, I invited his family over for a Japanese dinner.  My husband had worked in Japan and I’d been able to spend time there as a guest of the Japanese Government through the Fulbright Teacher Memorial Program.

That first dinner was our two families eating, laughing, mastering chop sticks to eat soba noodles and sharing stories of our fondness for the people of Japan and their cuisine. Later that week the other three “Moms”, exercising on the walking trail, talked the club into existence.

In this blog I’ll share what we have learned about creating and maintaining a successful club, cooking and enjoying food from cultures around the globe, and how it has enriched our lives in multiple and unexpected ways.

Please contact us with your stories, ideas, recipes, and menus. We look forward to evolving and sharing our journeys as we cook into cultures.

Quote of the Concept 
Food is so primal, so essential a part of our lives, often the mere sharing of recipes with strangers turns them into good friends. ~Jasmine Heiler, about recipezaar.com

Japanese Dinner Blog post 2

Make a Smilebox collage

At each meal we create a menu to help us know what each other has brought to the feast. For this dinner the menu was:  Appetizers Tempura   Salads Tofu and Tomato Green Beans in Sesame Dressing (Ingen no goma-ae) Entrees *Shrimp Sushi with Ginger and Wasabi Crabmeat in Naganegi (Leeks) with Gelatin Crabsticks with Wasabi Mayonnaise Scallops in Orange with Daikon and Red Miso Peppered Steak with Soba Noodles and Umeboshi Aka (pickled plum) Desserts Green Tea Ice Cream Coffee Jelly Japanese Cheesecake Chi Chi Dango Mochi  (Traditional candy for Boy's or Girl's day)   Permission to use Buddha and Frog Photographs  granted by Tim Kirchhof, copyright 2009 *Want to make sushi?  If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video's value is beyond measure.  Enjoy!

Quote of the Concept

If man has no tea in him, he is incapable of understanding truth and beauty.

Source: (Japanese)

Professional Blog Portfolio/Reflection

Reflecting on the blog writing this fall I believe I’ve moved from a beginning neophyte to a developing novice in digital writing.  The concepts, combinations of expression, collaboration and creation of shared meaning that digital writing brings started to create a bigger picture.  The blog posting created the medium to reflect this process and share with others in the cohort.  These novice, yet heartfelt blog reflections are a narrow window into the internal changes in my knowledge, understanding and embracing belief in the power of digital literacy. 

My nominations for my best postings for professionalism, creativity and design are: 

The most professional blog post goes to Wiki.  This post written with a professional voice shared resources and best practices for Wiki use in the classroom, an invitation to view and join the TALL2 Wiki on teacher job satisfaction, and reflections on the correlation of Wiki use and the best practices strategy of Cooperative Learning.   The practical nature of the post with ready 'to use tomorrow' resources made it most effective professional post.

The creativity ‘nod’ goes to Friends Forever - An Amateur Hour(s) Journey in Voice Thread.  My Voice Thread integrated music, text messages shorthand and engaging photographs of older women friends.  The photos, music and text allowed glimmers and glimpses of the girlhood they had shared and is a theme women of all ages can identify with and link to the ‘sisters’ in their lives. The honest story of the novice writing process is creatively contrasted by showcasing a sophisticated process and digital story described and created by Daniel Meadows.  The final creative feature of this post is the challenge to the reader to consider if digital storytelling and collaboration ever crossed the boundary of privacy rights in his documentary; he asks if his work is “Predator or Collaborator.”  This post creatively engages the reader in reflecting on digital storytelling in three very different ways.

Design Artists, Writing, Depth and Daily Living merits mention as the best design text both for the design of the writers and artists in their multigenre pieces  embedded and linked in the post and the layout of the posting.  Sandwiching the blog text between Billy Collin’s and Julian Gray’s Animated Poetry and T-Pain’s Obama Auto-Tune begins and ends the blog with interest.   The liberal use of engaging links to other writers and sites along with intriguing photos from three memoir pieces makes the post visually appealing.

The People’s Choice Award for professional blog entry goes to Natasha for her thoughtful and personal entry on Digital Practices and Media Education in my Classroom. The blog entry became a "short short" digital story with the picture of the hatched rock and her poetic and wistful reflection.  It touched my heart and opened the wonder of digital possibilities as she states "Digital literacy, I think, is in many ways like my hatched rock.  It is collaborative in nature, and it creates things that are exceptionally unexpected."

The People’s Choice Award for a personal blog entry goes to Michelle for her well written digital story  My Wedding Day Photo Story 3 accessed through her professional blog.   Watch it and you will know why.  Have a box of Kleenex on hand.

The People’s Choice Award for overall best professional blog is Isa's.  The exposure to new tools, careful crafting of classroom application, and rich reflection are stellar.

Wiki

Among a proliferate listing of articles, books, and Blog commentaries that lend themselves to promoting wiki writing is  50 Ways to Use Wikis for a More Collaborative and Interactive Classroom.   Resource creation, student participation, group projects, student interactions, classroom communications/organizations/celebrations and community are some of the categories they encourage educators to explore engaging students in writing in wikis.  The ReadWriteWeb expands uses but  more importantly demonstrates that a year and a half ago WetPaint a popular wiki site had raised over $40 million dollars in venture capital.  Wiki's are not a fad but a practical, effective, and efficient way to communicate collaborate.  More importantly they provide a framework to expand your own and others insights and learning as *"...we puny earthlings... reread, rethink, and especially revise."   In wikis we deepen our thinking and enrich our learning. (*Glen L. Bledsoe, Collaborative Digital Writing, Ch. 3, p.54)

Challenges in having students engage in collaborative writing are similar to the challenges in all cooperative grouping.  The Technology Teacher 10 Best Practices for using Wikis in Education offers advice and guidelines on how to address trust, participation, conventions, culture, authenticity, goals, deadlines etc.  With adults collaborators, the Seven Norms of Collaboration, would address issues that create challenges and invite all the wiki participants to bring their best selves to the wiki.  These norms are:

1.     Promoting a Spirit of Inquiry
2.     Pausing
3.     Paraphrasing
4.     Probing,
5.     Putting ideas on the Table (or I suggest wiki)
6.     Paying attention to self and others
7.     Presuming Positive Intentions

Currently, my most engaging wiki experience, that has met 21^st Century 2.0 criteria, is the TALL2 Wiki.  We explore Nathan Eklund's work about teacher job satisfaction. The Search Institute where Nathan works is most well know for it's work around assets for students.   Seven colleagues from six Minnesota school districts created the wiki to learn and share together with Nathan and engage 400 plus other professional development activists involved in Education Minnesota’s professional development division TALL (Teachers as Leaders and Learners).  Currently my public school district is sponsoring a CoP (Community of Practice) with 34 teachers studying How Was Your Day at School? Improving Dialogue about Teacher Job Satisfaction and may choose to engage in the wiki.   Please join our conversation TALL2 Wiki and add your insights and wisdom.

New Tool of the week:

CoWord a simple free way to work in Word simultaneously for group writing.  CoWord seems to be to Wiki Writing as Twitter is to Blogging.   It meets a simpler and smaller need to collaborate.

Artists, Writing, Depth and Daily Living

Immersed this past week in viewing digital literature/storytelling and multigenre writing Billy Collins poem Forgetfulness with artist images by Julian Gray of Head Gear was the easiest viewing.  It's black humor married to graceful everyday images was a gentle journey into digital poetry.

Most of the dozens of other pieces I viewed, pulled me back to memories of an earlier time in my life when I lived with, dated, and worked with artists. Days and nights were filled with  images, changed realities, color, intense discussions and often raw pain and joy swirling around in the mix of creating much like Thomas Swiss work.  A young musician told me once that all artists are driven by deep pain, the need to be heard, to somehow connect.  Normal people, he said, are content and art doesn’t come from contentment. That memory popped in my mind viewing the art, tragedy, and courage shared in My Shoes by Luciana Padilla, Sofa by Wayne Richard and Pralines by Carol Burch Brown at Center for Digital Story Telling.

Everyone is somewhere on a contentment and creativity continuum and that continuum position changes hourly, daily, weekly and across years.  Fundamentally I believe people want to have their voice heard.

Digit story telling and re-appropriation allows everyone but especially students to create their lives and stories within a broader range.  All the choice means everyone can be creative even if you don't believe or actually don't have great a great singing voice, a recognized ability to act or draw, or aren’t a techie.   Digital genres change the playing field; they allow room for varied talents, new voices and newly organized thoughts.   My Dad use to tell us, "There is nothing new under the sun, we're just seeing it new in our lives.” Digital genres allow us to share our stories and how we see life anew in our lives and our times.  Powerful.

Fun digital writing of the week
Found following links from You Will Not Believe created by Matthew Latkiewicz. 
This combination of music, film, humor, political essay, self promotion and technological advertisement by T-Pain is a wonderful example of multigenre writing.

Friends Forever - An Amateur Hour(s) Journey in Voice Thread

The creative side of Voice Thread is invigorating but what is in my mind that I want to do and what I can figure out to do are two different things.  Creating the story line with pictures and deciding what to mix with music, comments and text titles was engaging in a way text only isn’t.  The pictures and story FF (Forever Friends) influenced each other.   Choosing pictures fit the theme and then what pictures were chosen drove the text.  Loading pictures was easy, navigating the tutorials and changing settings was also. Challenges with recording and uploading were met with stubborn tenacity.  After many detours, an amateur first Voice Thread has evolved.  The preplanning and having a clearer picture in the future will help.  This text changed several times until I landed on text messages for the titles.  Now I hope my friends will accept the invitation and join me in creating a better FF (Friends Forever) story.

In my teaching I want to engage students in more collaborative learning and the resources from our book and Dr. Beach for Digital Storytelling.  This chapter could be an entire course.

Quote of the week from the University of Houston The Education Uses of Digital Storytelling:
" British photographer, educator and digital storyteller, Daniel Meadows defines digital stories as "short, personal multimedia tales told from the heart." The beauty of this form of digital expression, he maintains is that these stories can be created by people everywhere, on any subject, and shared electronically all over the world." ."  Be sure to check out Daniel's work.  I love it when he asks of his documentary and digital work, "Predator or Collaborator? "  Take a look; it's 1:13 into the Bus.

I'm a Believer

Our Digital Ning role-play was just plain fun; I felt like a little girl again pretending and trying on ideas and roles.   The creative personalities of our characters, wit, and play on words are fascinating.  It felt safe and freeing to take some risks with thoughts and writing styles when in the role.  As others stretched their roles it encouraged more creatively in return and permission to be a bit more in character as Dr. Liam Mulvehill.

Besides learning about the topic of digital use it freed me to think more expansively.  When writing I’d start with an idea from my character’s position and outlook and while looking for information to support it would find that it needed to be modified to be substantiated.   The same thing happened as I read other posts. As a high engagement learning process using collaboration to share ideas, information, positions, and creativity, it’s made me a believer not only of role plays as a classroom tool but the power of the interactive space to change learning.  This was not a worksheet or essay in virtual space.  Searching the net it seems that higher ed is taking a lead in this area with conferences posted at EdITLib, blogs, books such as Creating Thinking Professionals: Teaching and Learning about Professional Practice Using Interactive Technology.   Wikipedia has a section called Roleplay simulation but lacks resources.  The articles we read for class should be there and maybe some of our reflections!

I’ll be interested to learn how deeply the teacher monitors and evaluates the depth of discussion and authenticity of links?  How do students self evaluate?  Do group members give feedback to each other based on the rubric and then use that feedback in their self-evaluations?

Role Play and Simulation

Post #4 - In what ways do you already use role-play and simulation in your classroom for
purposes of learning?

This month mentees and I will  assume the roles of an administrator and new teacher to prepare for their first Teacher Performance Appraisal observation and conferences.  We'll also role play parent teacher conferences, phone calls, and any other teacher to adult, teacher to student, professional interaction that they would like to practice.   We role play at other times in the year and have created fishbowl role plays to model professional discussions in our LINKS class, the year long teacher induction course in our district. 

In our Teaching and Learning Professional Development team, we often assume roles to practice cognitive coaching, mentoring conversations, Problem Solving Protocols, etc.   The ability to take on a role frees us to think about the process and detach some of ourselves to make taking risks fun and safe.

Most of my direct teaching  is in partnership with teacher colleagues and involves explicit instruction, explorations, meta cognitive think aloud, modeling and then guided practice with colleagues' students around professional development topics in literacy.    Right now providing professional development on one on one reading assessment QRI-4, DRIA2, CORE, mentoring new teachers and RtI protocols.  Usually we don’t role-play because we jump right in with students that the teachers know.   On occasion if a teacher is hesitant, I'll ask if a role play where I’ll pretend I am a student and the teachers assess me role-playing that they are my reading teachers would be helpful.   It’s not high tech but it works for some teachers as a way to scaffold their own learning.

The hole in all of the role plays with adults is the lack of meaningful interdependence.

Perhaps in their Moodle post (secondary teachers) or blog post (elementary teachers) instead of reporting, they could role play and write the response from the perspective of:

    * the student.  It might help the reflection process to not only describe what they observed but to speculate or interview the student on what they learned to get accurate feedback or
    * the student's parent with a letter of reflection on what their child gained academically, socially and emotionally during the school year.

Another idea is that instead of a Power Point explaining what they observed as new teachers implementing new strategies and frameworks,  they take on the roles of different students and staff in their class and write a school newspaper, explaining their teaching and why their class is a respected in the school community. 

If all the new teachers in the new teacher class took on a role when they wrote to each other, it might engage them more quickly as a community that learns together while apart.

I'm not sure and need to ponder this more.  The ideas in Jenkins are stretching me to think more expansively.   Ideas anyone?

PS Role Play 'ruled' my classroom when I was an early educator both in preschool and grade 1.  Children naturally gravitate to roles to try on how they feel before they make them their own and to provide a cloak of safety and courage as they learn new ideas.

Some interesting LINKS as potential for our class role play.

Achieving Learning Outcomes Through Online Role-Play Simulation which is sponsored by AACE  EdITLib the Educaitona dn Informaton Techology Digitla Library 

AACE The Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education

The ONLINE ROLE_PLAY SIMULATION PLATFORM
Motivating Learning Experiences that Deliver Real Change 






This role play, Needle Stick is an active problem solving senerio involving the issues of a needle exchange program for drug users within close proximity to a school.

Search Engines or The Little Teacher That Could. (I think I can... I think I can.)

Post #3 - Describe the search methods and databases you employ to collect information for use in your work or writing.  In work, I've used primarily Eric, What Works Clearinghouse, John Hopkins Best Evidence Encyclopedia, Florida Center for Reading, University of Minnesota Center for Reading Research  International Reading Association, ASCD, NSDC  NCTE and other respected educational organizations and research universities with easy search vehicles built into them.  (Okay, mostly easy search vehicles.)  While the above may read like a laundry list it as taken several years and research to chose these sites and their respective feeds and blogs as those that keep me informed of new findings, research, expand what I know, while also exposing me to new teaching strategies, interventions and concepts.

How do you identify and test out relevant search categories or keywords?  I'm still learning this one.  In many ways I feel like the students described in chapter 2 Teaching Writing Using Blogs, Wikis, and other Digital Tools. At times I get no results and at other times am buried in data.  This is a chance to use paraphrasing and clarifying to hone in on what am I asking?  The question to answer is what is the essence of the search? Exploring more of the recommended links in this chapter is a new goal.
Theme for this week:Practice makes better.

How do you determine the validity and credibility of the information you acquire? 
For work and personal information such as health information, I'm conservative going to peer reviewed and edited sources, respected organizations and clearinghouses.   When the search is for something FUN such as new recipes for our International Food Club I tend to enter a general term in Google such as this months search for Egyptian appetizers and then meander through a maze of esoteric sites throughly enjoying poking around.  The search is somewhat like travel.  On some vacations you map out a direct route with formal stops and other days you start walking and see where it leads.  The key is to decide what journey you are on and purposely choose the search.
 

In what ways might you use RSS feeds or bookmarking software to access online sources of
info. (e.g. news, blogs, online magazines, podcasts, etc.) on your experience.  
I've been in Bloglines for several years and have feeds from multiple sources however still feel like a novice and would appreciate advice on how to organize better.  ASCD, the BBC, New York Times, NCTE InBlog feed into my email.   I've read that it is generational (read old) to feed into email so I've about 4 or 5 feeds to Bloglines for each email notice with the links and summaries in an attempt to learn new management. 

How do you help your students to engage in effective search strategies?
As a TOSA without a classroom of my own I  team with colleagues and work with them and their students.   In the last committee I facilitated we researched curriculum and best practices in RtI (Response to Intervention) with the charge of ascertaining what curriculum, programs, materials and strategies our Public School was using to best intervene with students.  To start I asked a colleague to inservice us on the best search tools for this work.  She compiled a list of links and took us through each, demonstrating the strengths and shortfalls of each tool.  Eric, the Education Clearinghouse, was a site all of us had used in the past.  However with advanced searches we were able to find what we needed.  For example a search of reading instruction identified 23, 247 items.  An advanced search of reading RtI tier 1 produced five articles, 4 of which were researchers that are respected names and topics that proved promising.  This week with the reading I learned that instead of pasting our links into a shared document we could have used the clipboard and then created folders right in Eric.  So I did.  These four are now entered into My Eric in a folder for future reference for a study group that is being in Oct for further RtI work.

In this class I want to get more effective at conducting rapid and fruitful searches.  Our role play will help as will exploring the search tools on the U of M web and gaining a degree of comfortable familiarity  with them.  This is an area that I'll play with to get better and welcome colleagial advice and modeling.

Experiences with Blogging

It is amazing to me how open bloggers are regarding their lives and thoughts.  Their openness adds meaning for them and invites meaning from others.   It was interesting in the reading to learn that extroverts in the studies posted more often and longer posts.  Not a surprise but logically comforting and modeled in my colleague Ellen's blog about her adventures in India.  I've been blogging since 2004 with a wide variety of experiences.

The first blog adventure was created to avoid attending more meetings; I'd just learned about blogging and was interested in jumping in.   Our social justice team at church chose to meet once a month in a blog for prayer and discussion.  Our blog fizzled out over several months though the quality of the posts was high.   One friend and I have maintained a friendship since.  This first experience while modest was motivating and showed me a very personal side of blogging.

The blogging I’ve been most actively engaged in has been academic.  I started a secondary Reading Network Blog with colleagues that they affectionately named "Jello Jugglers".  It's a private blog and used only by some members of the network, as many of the members prefer to communicate information and reading recommendations through email.  This was the first blog I set up and has been a good way to learn and identify other literacy colleagues who want to explore digital literacy also.


Blog experiences I've had in classes have been more rewarding as comments were more specific and personal.  It seems right for me to share in these venues.  Interestingly many of the posts in Moodle classes I've taken or taught were of low quality (Great idea!  I agree.) similar to what we see in student blogs before kids learn what a meaningful post involves.  Over the past four years the quality of exchange has increased. Tonight I spent over an hour reading, pondering and responding to mentees posts in our new teacher class and was appreciate of their insights and engaged in the learning.   

A 2007 curriculum review blog was an unsuccessful attempt to network about digital literacy. .  Questions and reflections generated no interest.   It’s hard to know if the questions were irrelevant communicated poorly, esoteric or none of the above!  Perhaps my tags didn't capture the network I was looking to reach. More likely I needed to share my story and gain interest by offering something to others and not just asking for input?

Online communication can build community and also create isolation and exclusion.   It’s interesting to me how many times I’ve heard adults comment on social networking experiences as reminding them of unhappy feelings they had in junior high school.   Perhaps that isn’t all bad though as I recall that passage as years of vulnerability and exploration with tremendous although awkward growth.  As a digital immigrant my blog journey with 23 Things on a Stick was more tenuous,  private, and ambling than a digital native and that's okay.  It did generate some responses from folks I'd never met, got me past the shy hesitation I had felt prior to the experience regarding public blogging.

This current experience taken with writing colleagues will help us grow to be the writing teachers we aspire to be.

Week Two Reflections on blogging

Post #2 - What experience do you have with blogging? How do they enhance or hinder your
communication with others?    What potentials do you see it having in your classroom?  OR
Find an example of a well written and maintained blog.  In what ways does this blog
exemplify networking through building relationships and self-sponsorship?

Monday, August 27, 2007

Resources: Do you want one?

Found in archived articles at the International Reading Association.

Higher expectations urged for all students in reading and writing sends us to the National Alliance for Educational Excellence report, Literacy Instruction in the Content Areas: Getting to the Core of Middle and High School Improvement . The report "argues that the acceptable standard for all students must exceed simply reading at grade level. Only advanced reading skills will truly prepare students to meet the challenges of education beyond high school, the needs of the workplace, and the demands of the 21st century."
The report is free, can be read on line, downloaded, or we can send for print copies.

Favorite quote found tonight in the VenturaCountyStar  August 27, 2007
"...UC Santa Barbara cultural studies professor Constance Penley, counter that when it comes to literacy among youth, there's entirely too much hand-wringing going on. "They're reading; they're writing," she said, "just not in the ways we think of it."
According to Penley, we need to see video images and text messages as an evolution rather than a devolution of literacy."