2010 Symposium Agenda
Beginning July 25, Facing History will host a weeklong symposium with leading scholars and practitioners about ways to use technology in the classroom. Fifteen expert educators, along with Facing History staff, will participate and return to their schools with plans to integrate innovative media projects into their teaching. Topics to be explored at the symposium include creative uses of online collaborative tools, student-produced video, podcasts, and photojournalism in the classroom, and preparing educators to foster students' critical thinking and analytic skills for evaluating new media and documentary films.
July 25-30, 2010
SUNDAY, JULY 25th
| 3:30pm | Welcome and Community Building Activity: Technology and Its Impact on our Personal and Professional Lives |
| 4:30pm | Facing History and Ourselves: Past, Present, and Future. 34 Years of Educational Innovation and Our Strategic Vision for the Future Mark Skvirsky, VP and Chief Program Officer, Facing History and Ourselves |
| 5:30pm | Dinner |
| 6:30pm | Twenty-First Century Students: Digital Media, Teaching & Learning Deb Chad, Program Director for Technology |
| 8:00pm | Closing |
MONDAY, JULY 26th
| 8:30am | Breakfast and Connections |
| 9:15am |
Teenagers and Identity in a Digital Age: Online Explorations and Ethical Development Katie Davis, Project Specialist, Project Zero Katie Davis Katie Davis is an advanced doctoral student in the Human Development and Education Program at Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she studies under Howard Gardner and Kurt Fischer. Davis’ research focuses on the psychosocial development of adolescents and emerging adults, with a particular focus on identity development. In recent work, she conducted a study investigating how girls in late adolescence and emerging adulthood use blogging as a way to express and explore their identities. Davis works as a project specialist on several research projects led by Howard Gardner at Project Zero. The GoodPlay Project explores the ethical dimensions of youth's online activities; the Developing Minds and Digital Media Project investigates the intersection of child development and new digital media; and the Trust and Trustworthiness Project seeks to uncover the factors youth consider when faced with judging others' trustworthiness. Davis holds two master’s degrees from Harvard—one in Mind, Brain, and Education and one in Risk and Prevention. Before beginning her doctoral work in 2005, she taught second grade in Framingham, Massachusetts, and fourth grade in Bermuda, her native country. |
| 10:45am | Images of “the Other” and Film: Helping Students Explore Issues of Difference and Membership Adam Strom, Director of Research and Development, Facing History and Ourselves |
| 12:00pm | Lunch and Book Group Discussions: • 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times by Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel • The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison • Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning • Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights by Jessie Daniels • The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future by S. Craig Watkins What connections did you make from the reading to teaching and learning and /or your classroom and students? How might the themes from this book connect to Facing History's work? |
| 1:00pm | Teaching about Darfur: Exploring Film,Internet Resources, and Web Literacy in Online Collaborative Environments Justin Reich, Co-director, EdTechTeacher Justin Reich is co-director of EdTechTeacher, and author of Best Ideas for Teaching with Technology: A Practical Guide for Teachers by Teachers. Reich is a doctoral candidate at the Harvard University School of Education and project manager of the Digital Collaborative Learning Communities Project, funded by the Hewlett Foundation. Reich conducts statistical research on usage statistics drawn from over 175,000 educational wikis, and he has conducted observational research in schools and classrooms in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Virginia, Georgia, and California. He has written several articles on education technology integration that have appeared in the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, and other publications. A former world history teacher at the Noble & Greenough School in Dedham, Massachusetts, Reich developed a variety of new curriculum and lesson plans around chatting, blogging, online research, and other projects involving new and emerging technologies. He is co-webmaster of Best of History Web Sites and co-director of The Center for Teaching History with Technology. |
| 5:30pm | Dinner |
| 6:00pm | The Role of Journalism in a Digital Age: An Exploration of the Documentary Film Reporter Selected viewing of film clips and discussion with Will Okun, educator featured in Reporter with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof Will Okun taught English and photography for nine years at Westside Alternative High School in the Austin community of low-income and minority homes in Chicago. In June of 2007, as part of the annual Win-A-Trip contest, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof selected Okun and medical student Leana Wen to travel to central Africa to blog and vlog about youth and medical issues. Their trip serves as the backdrop for the HBO documentary Reporter. The following school year, Okun continued to blog for the Times about teaching and urban education. He currently works for the Frank Porter Graham Childhood Development Institute and teaches GED in his native North Carolina. In fall 2010, he will begin the North Carolina Principal Fellows Program. |
| 8:00pm | Closing |
TUESDAY, JULY 27th
| 8:30am | Breakfast and Connections |
| 9:30am | Innovative Ways for Students to Use Google Earth to Engage with Literature and Film when studying the Holocaust Kevin McGonegal, Technical Integration Specialist, Cambridge Public Schools Kevin McGonegal works for the Cambridge Public Schools' Ed Tech Department. His department works with teachers to educate them on topics such as how to integrate SmartBoards into classrooms and how students can use iMove or podcasts in their projects. McGonegal helps to provide teachers with curriculum resources such as websites in all subject areas that can help their students learn in new, interactive ways. He has also helped to create the Google Earth Resources website that provides teachers with the Google Earth download, instructions, lesson ideas, and new resources relating to Google Earth that are continually updated. |
| 11:00am | NewsHour Educator Resources and the Changing Role of Journalism Leah Clapman, Managing Editor-Education, Newshour with Jim Lehrer Leah Clapman has spent over a decade working with teachers to make the journalism of NewsHour with Jim Lehrer into resources that engage students in the world around them. As managing editor for education she created NewsHour Extra, which provides daily video lesson plans, student voices and other tools to incorporate current events into history, world, economics, science, and language arts curriculums. The site has won awards from the National Association for Media Literacy Education and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Clapman oversaw partnerships with Google and YouTube to create student-generated videos during the 2008 presidential election, and with Knight-Ridder to produce youth-oriented features in education newspaper sections and Global Kids to produce online dialogues about current events that involved more than 100,000 youth from around the world. She also produced websites for MacNeil/Lehrer's documentary division. Clapman serves on the advisory board for Rock the Vote's civics initiative and PBS Digital's teacher research group, and she has participated in panels at the American Film Institute, Columbia University's Interactive Lab's Digital Conference, Temple University's Media Lab, the Journalism Education Association, National Council for the Social Studies, Connecticut Public Television and WETA. She worked on the television side of The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, CNN's Headline News and CNN Interactive in Atlanta. Clapman is a Princeton University graduate. |
| 12:45pm | Lunch and Conversation with Margot Stern Strom, Executive Director, Facing History and Ourselves |
| 1:30pm | Using and Creating Podcasts: Empowering Students to Produce and Share Learning John Englander, Associate Director of Online Learning, Facing History and Ourselves |
| 2:15am | Possibilities of Using Cell Phone Technology in the Classroom via virtual presentation Liz Kolb, Author and Instructor, University of Michigan Liz Kolb recently authored Toys to Tools: Connecting Student Cell Phones to Education, as well as MySpace Can Be a Learning Tool and Cell Phones as Learning Tools. Kolb focuses on questions such as Does banning cell phones in school cause more problems than integrating them? She is currently a graduate instructor at the University of Michigan focusing on Learning Technologies. As of 2009, she was an adjunct assistant professor at Madonna University and previously was a high school teacher and technology coordinator. Kolb has earned a Ph.D. in Learning Technologies from the University of Michigan and a M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction with a concentration in Educational Technology from Ashland University. |
| 3:30pm | An Evening in Boston's Historical Downtown at Faneuil Hall and the Harbor: Dinner at McCormick & Schmick's and Sunset Harbor Cruise |
| 8:30pm | Closing |
WEDNESDAY, JULY 28th
| 8:30am | Breakfast and Connections |
| 9:15am | Learning Strategies for Filming, Interviewing, and Editing Student-Created Video Projects Cara Powers, Co-Director, Press Pass TV Cara Lisa Berg Powers is an author, educator, organizer, and learner with a commitment to youth, media, and justice. She is currently a co-director at the youth journalism organization Press Pass TV, in addition to her work as a consultant. Powers holds her B.A. in Screen Studies with a focus in Urban Development/Social Change and her M.A. in Transformative Media Arts and is currently a candidate for her Ed.D. in Educational Leadership and Change with a concentration in Media Studies. She has published her first book, By Any Media Necessary. |
| 12:00pm | Lunch and Community Event: Photo Journalism and Visual Literacy Sara Terry, Aftermath Project Sara Terry was born in Detroit, Michigan and moved to the East Coast to work for the Christian Science Monitor in 1977, where she was a staff writer there for about 10 years, and also a founding reporter of Monitor Radio, the Monitor's now-defunct public radio program. As a reporter, Terry concentrated on social issues and cultural critiquing. She traveled around the world, producing a series with another reporter and photographer called "Children in Darkness: the exploitation of innocence,” about the exploitation of children in the developing world in 1987. She was selected as one of the top 10 female reporters in the U.S. for her international reporting. Terry has been a freelancer since 1990. She is still driven by social justice issues, and has reported on a range of subjects, from the torture and assassination of street children by death squads in Guatemala to grass-roots efforts in America to bridge the "digital divide." Her writing has appeared in several publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Fast Company, Rolling Stone and the Boston Globe Magazine. Terry also sits in as a guest host for the National Public Radio program To The Point, from KCRW in Santa Monica, California. |
| 1:45pm | Photo Journalism: Workshop on Classroom Applications and Exploring Photo Journalism Sara Terry, Aftermath Project, focusing on the question, What makes your community strong and what are some factors that pull it apart? |
| 5:30pm | Dinner |
| 7:00pm | Panel Discussion A Vision of the Future: Three Models of New Learning Platforms Abigail Taylor is the executive director of iCivics Inc., and the Our Courts project. She was the 2007–2008 fellow for the Sandra Day O’Connor Project on the State of the Judiciary at Georgetown Law. Taylor previously worked as a senior policy associate at Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, and she has designed curriculum for and taught middle school-aged youth in various traditional and nontraditional educational settings. She received a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an M.A. in public policy and women’s studies from George Washington University, and a B.A. from Yale University. Michael Epstein is the director, founder, and CEO of Untravel Media. As a graduate student, he conducted research focusing on storytelling techniques, audiences, and technologies. His thesis focused on industry and experimental projects bringing mobile technologists and storytellers together. In 2004–2005 he was awarded grants from the European Union, Motorola, and Dell to create a highly-publicized mobile narrative walking tour in Venice, Italy, in partnership with MIT, Dell, and the European Union. The tour highlighted new forms of location-based storytelling, featuring documentary vignettes set in backstage areas of this tourist destination. From that project Epstein formed the framework for Untravel Media, a unique production and software company established in 2006 that focuses on mobile storytelling. He now runs the day-to-day operations and directs client productions for Untravel Media. Working with a range of clients and grants, the company has grown to a diverse, Boston-based studio of developers, designers, writers, and producers. Epstein has a range of international teaching experiences and is fluent in three languages. He was a reporter on NPR's Morning Edition and the author of two Macromedia books on classroom use of multimedia. Epstein holds an M.S. in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and a B.A. in Science, Technology, and Society from Vassar College. Michael Durney, Chief Operating Officer, Facing History and Ourselves Working in partnership with Coco Studios, Facing History will pilot a prototype of the CocoDEEP immersive, educational environment allowing visitors to the online version of the Choosing To Participate exhibit to build their own connections between resources and invite others to evaluate, comment on, and extend those connections. |
| 8:30pm | Closing |
THURSDAY, JULY 29th
| 8:30am | Breakfast and Connections |
| 9:15am | Models for Sharing: Facing History's Online Projects for Students • Not in Our Schools presented by Ronnie Millar, Project Manager for Program Operations, Facing History and Ourselves • Be the Change: Upstanders for Human Rights presented by John Englander, Associate Director of Online Learning, Facing History and Ourselves • One Person—One Vote! Why Should We Care? presented by KC Kourtz, Program Associate for Technology, Facing History and Ourselves |
| 10:15am | Guidelines and Project Planning for In-School Projects Deb Chad, Program Director for Technology and Dimitry Anselme, Program Director for Staff Development, Facing History and Ourselves |
| 12:00pm | Lunch |
| 12:30pm | Departure for Evening Activities in Rhode Island |
| 3:00pm | Discussion with Documentary Film Creators: Making your Media Matter Pamela Yates and Paco de Onís will describe their experiences in creating social issue films and media tools across multiple digital platforms so that they complement each other, engage audiences, provoke thought and educate. They will show examples of how they provide opportunities to students within the social media sphere to communicate with people who are living these issues, whether it's a person in an internally displaced persons camp in Uganda, a member of Darfuri civil society, or an intern at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Pamela Yates is the director of Skylight Pictures. She is the recipient of a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the director of Sundance Award–winning When the Mountains Tremble, producer of Emmy Award–winning Loss of Innocence, and the executive producer of the Academy Award–winning Witness to War. Yates is a co¬founder of Skylight Pictures, Inc. She is a member of the Director’s Guild of America (DGA) and The Writers Guild of America (WGA). Paco de Onís is a film producer who grew up in several Latin American countries and speaks Spanish, Portuguese, English, Italian, and French. He recently produced a film about the International Criminal Court titled The Reckoning (which premiered at Sundance in 2009), accompanied by a an audience engagement project promoting global rule of law, IJCentral. Prior to the ICC project, he produced State of Fear, a Skylight Pictures film about Peru's 20-year war on terror, based on the findings of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Now he is producing Granito, a documentary puzzle about historical memory. De Onis has produced documentaries for PBS (On Our Own Terms with Bill Moyers), National Geographic (Secrets from the Grave), New York Times Television (Police Force and Paramedics), and MSNBC (Edgewise with John Hockenberry). |
| 4:30pm | Farewell Celebration at an oceanfront home in Tiverton, Rhode Island |
| 9:00pm | Closing |
FRIDAY, JULY 30th
| 8:30am | Breakfast and Project Planning Facing History Staff and Teacher Teams |
| 9:30am | Copyright and Licensing: Considerations for Educators and Students Eric Saltzman, Founder and Board Member of Creative Commons, Former Executive Director of the Berkman Center, Harvard University Eric Saltzman previously served as a Berkman Fellow and executive director of the Berkman Center. A 1972 graduate of Harvard Law School, he began his career as a criminal defense attorney in Seattle's public defender office. He later took up filmmaking, and founded the Harvard Law School Evidence Film Project to re-create and film trials as teaching tools. He went on to produce and direct films on the law for ABC, CBS, PBS, and the BBC, winning Emmy and the ABA Silver Gavel awards, among others. During Saltzman’s tenure, the Berkman Center extended its reach in the international community, taking on the role of advisor to policy-making bodies engaged in digital divide issues and launching projects including Creative Commons and ILAW. Saltzman is a founder and board member of Creative Commons, a collaborative project designed to encourage and enable the sharing and use of creative works on the Internet by reinvigorating the public domain. He also helped to establish ILAW, which brings participants from around the world together with top legal experts to explore the most pressing cyber law suits being debate, including intellectual property online, privacy versus security on the Net, and cybercrime and jurisdiction. |
| 10:30am | Participants' Presentations of Project Ideas and Next Steps Deb Chad, Program Director for Technology, Facing History and Ourselves |
| 11:30am | Closing Thoughts and Evaluation |
| 12:00pm | Lunch and final departures |
