Group items tagged

Bernajean Porter works with educators everywhere to teach digital storytelling. She joined Tim Wilson in the NECC podcasting studio to talk about ISTE's new digital storytelling project and the newest digital storytelling frontier, Second Life.

Student -created videos telling powerful stories!! D.U.S.T.Y. is an afterschool program for middle and high school students in Oakland, CA. DUSTY students work on computers to create their own Digital Stories, as well at to generate rap and hip hop "beats and rhymes." Throughout the creative process, students learn to master programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, iMovie, and Fruity Loops with the help of skilled instructors. At the end of each semester, the students' creative masterpieces, including digital stories, raps, beats, and performances are showcased in some sort of final event at The Parkway Theatre, The Metro, and other local venues.

In this information technology age, children and youth in West and East Oakland face the additional disadvantage of a digital divide, which separates ethnicities, socio-economic classes, genders, and ages. Youth from low-income communities rarely have access to cutting edge communication technologies or, just as importantly, to empowering uses of them. A comparison between the number of computers per Oakland school with the schools' statewide academic performance ranking, or API, revealed that some schools with high numbers of computers have very low API's. This discrepancy suggests that simply having technology is not enough; rather, to improve student academic outcomes, technology must be meaningfully used.

Phenomenal global collaboration project involving students from 15 countries. Teaching assignment is replicated across continents. Last year's project, Rock n Sol, was featured in the California K-12 Technology Showcase. This year's project, "Are You Game" focuses on digital storytelling. Students collaborate to compose music, make movies, podcasts, and experiments and met in face to face video-conferences. Using Garage Band, kids annually create a collaborative song that has been touched in every continent in the world. Each week, each group contributes 30 seconds with a specific musical instrument. Even blind students are involved in the project.

A free online device that can be used for digital storytelling/cyberbullying. Children and teens create comic strips online by choosing backgrounds, characters, and props. They can also write dialogue using speech bubbles. There is a Comic Strip Planning Sheet, a printable PDF that comic creators can use to draft and revise their work before creating and printing their final comics. When the comics are completed, they can be printed out and shared. The sample comic strip shows a three-pane comic.

Flickschool is the work of Marco Torres, a history teacher at a large high school in San Fernando ,who works with students in the area of digital storytelling and other creative endeavors. This particular video covers a student discussion of social networking, global learning and responsibility.

Use Flickr Storm with your students for locating imagery for digital storytelling projects. It locates multiple photos for you that relate to the keyword and annotates with a Creative Commons license, providing the user name you need for attribution. There is a great tutorial on using Flickr Storm at http://www.jakesonline.org/using_flickrstorm.pdf

Dizzywood, a virtual world and online game for children ages 8-12, today announced that it has been selected by the YMCA of San Francisco to enhance the youth program's technology curriculum. The YMCA is using Dizzywood's virtual environment to reinforce its program emphasis on activities that promote values such as caring, honesty, respect and responsibility. Children also learn about important issues relating to virtual worlds, such as digital citizenship and online safety, as well as complete storytelling and team-building exercises that emphasize creativity, writing and reading skills, and working together to achieve goals. The YMCA program is similar to the elementary school program that Dizzywood recently completed with the Reed Union School District (Marin County, CA). The highly interactive workshop, which ran from April through June, used virtual activities to reinforce the school's character pillars, which include caring, citizenship, fairness, respect, responsibility and trustworthiness, among other core values.

Web-based Comics. BitStrips for Schools places it on a private virtual network where teachers can moderate content and review all characters and comics. Students can flag inappropriate comments or bullying, which is then instantly removed pending teacher review. There is a nominal fee of $9.95 per month for up to 40 students.

GR 5-8 students will develop media literacy skills as they learn about the techniques of propaganda in sales commercials. They will brainstorm a new product and use Frames4 (animation and digital storytelling software) to create a 30-second commercial using at least two propaganda techniques.