Thank you, Jennifer, for sharing your process on digital storytelling. I teach middle school English and am not as tech-savvy as you, but I know the value of a well-planned multimedia project for students. I am inspired to plan out a similar project, now that I see how to do it. I like that they create a storyboard and script to emphasize the "meat" of their project and not the glitzy stuff. Their narrated videos are quite impressive. Your students are lucky to have you!
Thanks Irene! The students did such an amazing job. You really don't have to be tech-saavy to employ this in your classroom. The software is already so user-friendly. The person who taught me how to do this was an English teacher - she would use it with poetry, so that students would have to emphasize emotion in their reading. Very effective!
Jennifer, this is wonderful! I love how you give your students choices of which app to use and how you place the onus on them to learn it and to troubleshoot on their own. This is something that I teach in my computer classes because students have to acquire and feel comfortable with that skill. Thanks!
Check out this link. It highlights the difference between a "text reader," which many applications provide, and a "book reader" that includes navigation by chapter and page number, the ability to skip parts, and a knowledge of the normal parts of a book (like table of contents, footnotes, sidebar, etc.)
DAISY Makes Reading Easier (YouTube Video)
transcript
children from low-income families spend more time handling technology -- across platforms -- than their wealthier counterparts, and across class, kids mainly use their "handling skills" for entertainment. They play games, watch videos, and visit social networking sites.
there's scant evidence that anyone but the companies who make, sell, and advertise on these new technologies benefit from the time young children spend with them, there's plenty of reason to be worried about it.
studies showing that the bells and whistles of electronic books actually detract from reading comprehension.
I'm worried that screen-based reading, with omnipresent hyperlinks, interferes with comprehension and memory, and that heavy Internet use appears to encourage distractedness and discourage deep thinking, empathy, and emotion.
fast-paced video games trigger dopamine squirts in our brains -- kind of like cocaine.
here's what worries me most: We're turning to the companies that profit from these technologies to help parents manage their kids' relationship with screens. While it's great that the Federal Communications Commission is launching a campaign to promote digital literacy, the fact that companies like Best Buy and Microsoft are funding it make it unlikely that weaning kids from their products will be a priority.
the skills they will always need to thrive -- deep thinking, the ability to differentiate fact from hype, creativity, self-regulation, empathy, and self-reflection -- aren't learned in front of screens. They are learned through face-to-face communication, hands-on exploration of the world, opportunities for thoughtful reflection, and dreams.
Feed readers
are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner because they
make sifting through the amazing amount of content added to the Internet
easy. Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free tools that can
automatically check nearly any website for new content dozens of times a
day---saving ridiculous amounts of time and customizing learning experiences for
anyone.
Imagine
never having to go hunting for new information from your favorite sources
again. Learning goes from a frustrating search through thousands of
marginal links written by questionable characters to quickly browsing the
thoughts of writers that you trust, respect and enjoy.
Feed readers can
quickly and easily support blogging in the classroom, allowing teachers to
provide students with ready access to age-appropriate sites of interest that are
connected to the curriculum. By collecting sites in advance and organizing
them with a feed reader, teachers can make accessing information manageable for
their students.
Here are several
examples of feed readers in action:
Used specifically as
a part of one classroom project, this feed list contains information related to
global warming that students can use as a starting point for individual
research.
While there are literally dozens of different feed reader
programs to choose from (Bloglines andGoogle Reader are two
biggies), Pageflakes is a favorite of
many educators because it has a visual layout that is easy to read and
interesting to look at. It is also free and web-based. That
means that users can check accounts from any computer with an Internet
connection. Finally, Pageflakes makes it quick and easy to add new
websites to a growing feed list—and to get rid of any websites that users are no
longer interested in.
What's even
better: Pageflakes has been developinga teacher version of their tooljust for us that includes an online grade tracker,
a task list and a built in writing tutor. As Pageflakes works to perfect
its teacher product, this might become one of the first kid-friendly feed
readers on the market. Teacher Pageflakes users can actually blog and create a
discussion forum directly in their feed reader---making an all-in-one digital
home for students.
For more
information about the teacher version of Pageflakes, check out this
review:
Interestingly, unlike math, which can often be difficult to teach in all of its abstraction, algorithms do stuff. Algorithms are operational. You show kids how to use a program like Scratch or Hackasaurus and, very soon, they can actually manipulate, create, and do, in their very own and special way.
the beauty of teaching even the youngest kids algorithms and algorithmic or procedural thinking is that it gives them the same tool of agency and production that writing and even reading gave to industrial age learners who, for the first time in history, had access to cheap books and other forms of print.
Cathy Davidson discusses the need for a fourth "R" -pertaining to "algoRithim" - It is important, she argues, because, "in the 21st century, we need [an]...expanded push towards the literacy that defines our era, computational literacy. Algorithms are as basic to the way the 21st century digital age works as reading, writing, and arithmetic were to the late 18th century Industrial era."
"The classic "3 R's" of learning are, of course, Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmetic. For the 21st century, we need to add a fourth R--and it will help inspire the other three: Algorithm. "
ReadWorks enables teachers to solve the reading comprehension crisis and eliminate the achievement gap in the U.S. by improving teacher effectiveness through research-based and classroom-proven instructional practices, curriculum, and open-access online technology.
Search for lessons and reading passages by grade and skill. In your account you can create digital binders of the lesson plans and reading passages that you want to use.
paper and connection to text messaging and literacy: the more textism a child uses, the higher their scores on vocabulary and reading - haven't read the whole paper - one has to pay for it - but if there is merit here this presents a new dynamic educators haven't thought of
Join us as we create a national awareness campaign to celebrate innovative teachers and instructional strategies. Technology has changed the way we do everything from grocery shopping, to listening to music, and reading books. It's time to take action to leverage this potential with more innovative uses of technology in our nation's schools to ensure every student experiences personalized learning with great teaching.
Michael Levine shares three powerful trends in digital media that are revolutionizing learning. Thank you to Definition 6 for providing in-kind video editing...
At first I was a little horrified by the over exposure of this child's life work and wondered how she'd feel as a teen about her personal journey, the I read yellow cards, and that changed my mind! Thank you for sharing this link.
This site is wonderful for younger students and older ELLs. Using exquisite art graphics from an extensive library of images children create online storybooks. The fanciful and beautiful graphics inspire the creator to write a story. The program then publishes the online book with a default "private" setting. This site appears to be carefully monitored and supervised. Excellent for ELA.
This site is wonderful for younger students and older ELLs. Using exquisite art graphics from an extensive library of images children create online storybooks. The fanciful and beautiful graphics inspire the creator to write a story. The program then publishes the online book with a default "private" setting. This site appears to be carefully monitored and supervised. Excellent for ELA.
Story Bird widely used story book maker website. It has great templates picture bank. It's ease to use and the results look wonderful.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English
If it doesn't seem to matter to the learners, it will be wasted time for them. Sometimes teachers are only in a PD session for the hours. In such cases, it is the responsibility of the facilitator to make sure there is at least one nugget of info that matters to them.
the team determined a specific goal that they wanted to accomplish by the end of the day
Good practice to ask what individuals hope to gain but also should ask what hope to gain via collaborative efforts. Maybe should ask them to share their top three strengths to give us a place for building upon.
To guide the work time, we observed some classrooms and discussed what we noticed. Based on our goals, we set clear targets and some time boundaries to check in on progress.
We do this with teachers as we begin work with them. Maybe we need to be more transparent and have this in writing as well for them to reference- menu.
I think one of the keys here is to acknowledge that society is evolving and we need to evolve to meet the needs of society - for example, just because research shows that, for some things, handwriting helps people remember something better or reading a hard copy is easier for comprehension than a digital copy - just because research at this point confirms these concepts, that doesn't mean we don't need to provide opportunities for practice and teach learners to recall digitally written info or comprehend digital text. If that is the trend the world is moving toward, we have to move in that direction as well - or be left behind.
Great little reference tool for quoting directly to specific sections of websites, instead of having to read through whole page. Good improvement on hyperlinking digital literacy skill.
Sharing student work on a course blog is an example of what Randall Bass and Heidi Elmendorf, of Georgetown University, call "social pedagogies." They define these as "design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call an 'authentic audience' (other than the teacher), where the representation of knowledge for an audience is absolutely central to the construction of knowledge in a course."
External audiences certainly motivate students to do their best work. But students can also serve as their own authentic audience when asked to create meaningful work to share with one another.
The last sentence is especially important in institutional contexts where the staff voices their distrust against "open scholarship" (Weller 2011), web 2.0 and/or open education. Where "privacy" is deemed the most important thing in dealing with new technologies, advocates of an external audience have to be prepared for certain questions.
yes! nothing but barriers! However, it is unclear if the worries about pravacy are in regards to students or is it instructors who fear teaching in the open. everyone cites FERPA and protection of student identities, but I have yet to hear any student refusing to work in the open...
Students most likely won't find this difficult. After all, you're asking them to surf the Web and tag pages they like. That's something they do via Facebook every day. By having them share course-related content with their peers in the class, however, you'll tap into their desires to be part of your course's learning community. And you might be surprised by the resources they find and share.
While keynote speakers and session leaders are speaking, audience members are sharing highlights, asking questions, and conversing with colleagues on Twitter
classrooms where students are motivated to learn. Will this work in a HS classroom where kids just view their phones as a means to check up on people? Maybe if they can see "cool" class could be if they were responsible for the freedoms that would be needed to use twitter or other similar sites.
Ask your students to create accounts on Twitter or some other back-channel tool and share ideas that occur to them in your course. You might give them specific assignments, as does the University of Connecticut's Margaret Rubega, who asks students in her ornithology class to tweet about birds they see. During a face-to-face class session, you could have students discuss their reading in small groups and share observations on the back channel. Or you could simply ask them to post a single question about the week's reading they would like to discuss.
A back channel provides students a way to stay connected to the course and their fellow students. Students are often able to integrate back channels into their daily lives, checking for and sending updates on their smartphones, for instance. That helps the class become more of a community and gives students another way to learn from each other.
Deep learning is hard work, and students need to be well motivated in order to pursue it. Extrinsic factors like grades aren't sufficient—they motivate competitive students toward strategic learning and risk-averse students to surface learning.
Social pedagogies provide a way to tap into a set of intrinsic motivations that we often overlook: people's desire to be part of a community and to share what they know with that community.
Online, social pedagogies can play an important role in creating such a community. These are strong motivators, and we can make use of them in the courses we teach.
The papers they wrote for my course weren't just academic exercises; they were authentic expressions of learning, open to the world as part of their "digital footprints."
Yes, but what is the relation between such writing and ("proper"?) academic writing?
Collaborative documents need not be text-based works. Sarah C. Stiles, a sociologist at Georgetown, has had her students create collaborative timelines showing the activities of characters in a text, using a presentation tool called Prezi.com. I used that tool to have my cryptography students create a map of the debate over security and privacy. They worked in small groups to brainstorm arguments, and contributed those arguments to a shared debate map synchronously during class.
A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
A great blog post on social pedagogies and how they can be incorporated in university/college classes. A good understanding of creating authentic learning experiences through social media.
As 21st century educators, we don't have to be tethered to technology to reap the benefits. By using digital tools such as Evernote and Post-Its to support quality instruction, instead of the other way around, we can stay focused on the learner and their needs.
Jennifer Carey on 17 Sep 11Would love colleagues' thoughts and input on this lesson!
bruce schwartz on 17 Sep 11Jennifer, this is wonderful! I love how you give your students choices of which app to use and how you place the onus on them to learn it and to troubleshoot on their own. This is something that I teach in my computer classes because students have to acquire and feel comfortable with that skill. Thanks!
