Thursday, January 15, 2009

AWNM 2 Story


Tim Stahmer Tim is an Instructional Technology Specialist working in the Office of Instructional Technology Integration for an overly-large school district on the Virginia side of Washington DC. He taught middle and high school math as well as computer literacy. For the past 11 years he has helped teachers, administrators and others at all levels make sense of technology in their classrooms and, of course, repaired a few computers and printers along the way. These days he works mostly with the technology trainers in elementary schools.


Sharon Peters Until June 2007, Sharon Peters was teaching English at an independent middle and high school in Montréal , Lower Canada College. In the summer of 2007, she began her new role as education consultant for LEARN, an arm of the ministry of education in Québec, Canada. There she acts as the English Language Arts resource “go to” girl for the English sector of the province of Québec.

31 comments:

Maxe2012 said...
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robertc2012 said...

I thought that this fishbowl was okay. It was fun discussing story and its different aspects especially with people outside of our class. I was excited to create my own "story blog", but that really didn't turn out the way I hoped. It was funny but sort of distracting from the fishbowl.
I enjoyed the polls because they help me see what the rest of the class thinks and feels about a subject. They also make the fishbowl more fun to be a part of.

AllisonM2012 said...

I thought that this fishbowl was about average. It wasn’t amazing but it thought people did a much better job of keeping their comments relevant.
In the outer circle I really enjoyed having the other people around the world blogging with us. It was extremely interesting to heat their insights and look at opinions from another perspective. Though, this time the number of people that moved from the inner circle to outer circle decreased significantly.
The inner did a good job of pulling together different ideas. They kept the discussion going. It had a very nice flow to it.
We also definitely had many more polls than we normally do.

katieh2012 said...

Todays fishbowl was rather slow at first but when we finally got into the flow, some good points were made. I have to say that its not one of our better ones, but it was decent. I think that there wasn't nearly as much prep for this one as for the Daniel Pink fishbowl, simply because that one was a much larger ordeal.
It was interesting to have input from outside gain, and Tim and Sharon made very good points.
The inner circle was a bit repetitive, but they did a good job of discussing their points and questions.

Anonymous said...

I thought that the inner circle was well, and that the outer circle was about the same. It wasn't our best, though... The polls were good, though. I don't have many comments, except that we could have done better. It may have been because it was like Monday, we were all tired, second hour... blah blah blah. We just have to try better next time.

Maxe2012 said...

I didn't think the fishbowl yesterday was our best work. We didn't come up with too many topics like we normally do and they weren't as interesting. However, it was cool to still have some people outside of the class talk to us. They were pretty interesting and it was fun. I also liked writing the story in the other blog but I am not entirely sure of what that accomplished other than a few people working together.

sammiet2012 said...

I thought that this fishbowl went well, but I think that it started slow. I would say that more people need to come prepared with questions. I also enjoyed the polls because they brought up interesting topics.

john c said...

Well, the fishbowl was o.k. It never really got moving and, I know at least for me, we were all tired coming back from the break and I hadn't prepared enough. Also, almost no one came into the inner circle ( probably because it was moving to slow) and we got off topic a lot. I didn't get to see the outer circle a ton but I assume that they did better than the inner circle.

Thanks

John

BernardoT2012 said...

It was pretty good, but not our best fischbowl ever. The polls helped a lot and were very positive for the conversation. I was happy that we had some outside views, though Tim was much more open minded than I thought he would be.

I wish we had had a few conversations with more people contributing, instead of the many we had between fewer people. I also wish that we had done Roberts story idea on the cover it live. It would have given us a better perspective on what we were talking about. I think we should have another cover it live just with story, but go in order so two people don't respond to the same line at once.

Laurao said...

I thought the inner circle did a fantastic job. My computer shut down before I could start blogging or read the blog but I know that they did awesome as well. The inner circle became a little bit repetitive after a while, it seems that we get stuck in little ruts when we don't know where the discussion is going. Having input from Tim and Sharon was very fun. It is always great to have other imput into our fischbowls. Overall it was a pretty good fischbowl.

Carolyn F. said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
chelseac2012 said...

I enjoyed the fishbowl, we've had better but it was still fun. I thought the discussion on the blog was a little better than the inner circle discusion, mostly because very few people got up and went in to share ideas. Overall, the fishbowl wasn't bad but is certainly wasn't one of our best.

stephaniel2012 said...

I thought that this fishbowl was not as good as we're capable of. I find that we weren't really hitting any big ground-breaking realizations about anything as we were discussing. I felt the conversation dragged a little bit in comparison to our other fishbowls. It was good, certainly, and it made us think, sure, but we're Smith's Period 2 English 9 Honors class! We're better than that. We all know it. It wasn't a bad discussion in particular, it was simply not to our degree of capability. On the opposite side of the spectrum, I find that there were good comments made that spurred on further discussion, which was good. It needed a little more flow, spark and overall just a little bit more smithyness.

KyleL2012 said...

I think that the inner circle did a nice job discussing the Story. It's a lot harder to discuss this sense than the others in my opinion, but we tried our best in the inner circle to keep the thoughts flowing. The only problem I saw was that the outer circle was either intimidated or not motivated enough to move into the inner circle and verbally discuss. Even though Story is a hard topic to discuss, some people still should have put their thoughts out there. But all in all the discussion went well.

stellab2012 said...

I think that the fishbowl yesterday could have gone a lot better than it did. The inner circle started off really slow and seemed like they were not very prepared with questions. As conversation picked up, though, it began flowing a bit smoother. It seemed that conversations touched on the same point a lot of the time and there wasn't much input from the outer circle into the inner circle.
The discussion on the outer circle, I believe, did a good job staying on line to the topic and I think having people from other places joining in with our class helped keep up the discussion because we got new input.

nickb2012 said...

the fishbowl was great,i'd like to thank Mr. Stahmer and Mrs. Peters for joining us. i think on the blog, alot of different things were discussed, which is great, but in the inner circle we kept coming back to a couple main ideas, no matter where we branched. One was perspective. I signed up for this fishbowl because i like the different stories and how every other chapter relates to story.

kaleidoscope_eyes said...

This fishbowl was really cool, because there are so many implications of story. Out loud and on the blog we were able to cover many of these. As opposed to blogging like a madman, this time i mostly sat back, read and listened to what other people were saying. The cover it live goes so fast, and if you fall behind it doesn't let you scroll up to the conversation earlier for very long, which is a pain. This wasn't a particularly bad fishbowl, but I think we have done better. There wasn't anything wrong, but there wasn't as much passion.

AustinW2012 said...

The fishbowl was not too bad. I think we did pretty well but it was not the same level as it was when Mr. Pink was participating. We did cover a lot of material and went rapidly but we didn't ask as in depth questions as when he was here. I still think it was good because we didn't really lack anything it just failed to be above and beyond like with the last fishowl. I personally was happy with myself because I not only talked in several conversations in the live blog but I also entered the inner circle. One other thing I saw that was good is we seemed more relaxed and less tense when Mr. Pink was not watching. This helped te conversation to flow more smoothly and not come to akward pauses. In the end I think the fishbowl was good but we could have done a little better.

alexandriab2012 said...

I think the fishbowl went really well, we dicussed a lot of topics and I think that we covered a lot of ground. Next time, I think more people could come into the fishbowl, towards the end of the convestation people started coming in however, before that it was just the dicussers and the presenters. I like the poll questions, for all of the questions I always had a question that could lead up to a following question.

Carolyn F. said...

I didn't think this was our best fishbowl but I know that it wasn't the horrid. I think I could have prepared with different questions than I did, and I think that the outer circle could have come into the inner circle more and brought newer ideas and questions into the discussion. I wasn't participating on the blog, so I'm not sure how that went. I overall thought we did and okay job, but an okay job isn't going to change the world so I think we could step up our game to the next level.

kaleidoscope_eyes said...

I thought the polls were annoying. I prefered it when we only used a few.

mariep2012 said...

I thought that the fishbowl went really well. I had a really good conversation with a few people and it really opened up my view of what story means. Thanks Katie, Bernardo and Tristan! Also the inner circle seemed slow to start, but the conversation seemed to rev up later. I also think that it is great how others can pop into the conversation and watch what we have to say. In all, I enjoyed it, and we are definitely accomplishing a lot with these fishbowls.

ericak2012 said...

I thought that this fishbowl was just average, there wasn't any absolutely amazing conversation going on in the inner circle but we were all making good connections and so it wasn't bad either. The outer circle, with their conversation and Robert's story blog, were proving that story comes in many forms.

alisonr2012 said...

I thought the fishbowl was okay. No one really moved into the inner circle and the discussion really only stayed on one thing instead of discussing the other aspects of story. The polls were fun though and helped make the fishbowl more enjoyable.

connorm said...

I feel that yesterdays fishbowl felt almost hollow and had not very deep extra meaning in it. i guess we sort of came up with some good ideas but I don't think we understood story very much. Like Ms. Smith said i don't think any of us were well prepared for this bowl and could have done a much better job discussing and analyzing the ideas behind story.

jays2012 said...

The fishbowl yesterday was kind of slow to begin with but, after we started all of our topics, it started to flow at least in the outer circle. We talked a lot about a "true" story and what makes the story "honest" or "true." I asked a question that said, "Have you ever told a story once, and then make up things about it to make your story sound better?" With that question, there were mixed answers and it was really cool to see all the people that had never realized they did that and would that make the story still true? Yesterdays fishbowl wasn't top notch like our Daniel Pink fishbowl but it was still a fun topic to agrue and talk about.

PeterH2012 said...

This fishbowl was good, but not our best. The inner circle was a little slow, and there were some points with no talk at all. The outer circle did a good job blogging, but didn't get up and join the inner circle as much as usual.

bayleyk2012 said...

So, I was in the inner circle. I thought that our discussion was good. Not the best that we've ever had but not horrible. Though I did get the feeling that some people didn't prep for the discussion very well. And as many people have said, the conversation did get a little bit repetitive after a time. And like Smith said not many people jumped into the inner circle. Overall it was an ok fishbowl, but I believe that we can do better.

ashleys2012 said...

The fisch bowl yesterday, in my opinion, was just average. At times in the inner circle, there were a couple awkward pauses in between speakers. I didn’t feel like we reached an intense topic until the last half. Also, not very many people from the outside circle walked into the inner circle. I definitely think that there are still things we need to work on such as coming in with questions, view points, etc. to avoid those awkward pauses.

Even though I was not on the outer circle blogging with Tim Stahmer and Sharon Peters, I want to say thank you to the both of you and we all enjoyed having you!

Austin Davis said...

I agree with robert in saying it was ok, but I would go on to say that ok, isn't superb or well forulated. The overall efffort put forth was minimal inner and outer, and that led to the conversation not picking up, the way it normally does. The class wasn't prepared for a well run fishbowl, instead we covered limited topics, not really expanding or getting definitive. Next time, it would be beneficial for the inner and outer circle to collaborate and for the class to think about ways to accomplish what needs to be done,and allow for more topics covered.

Carol Horton said...

We at
College Reine Marie enjoyed the polls cause it creates interesting topics.