Group items tagged

"It is time for another chapter in the series of Digital Storytelling for Educators posts. When I wrote The Guide to Digital Storytelling Tools for Educators (2008), I did not have a Smartphone yet and had yet to envision a device like the iPad."

"I was lucky to have shared my childhood bedroom for a few years with my grandmother, when she had come to live with us after an illness. At bedtime, she would tell me stories of her parents and three brothers and growing up in East Prussia, fleeing to the West after WW2 and the things that occupied her mind. I was hooked on storytelling. The fascination grew when technology became available and opened up possibilities that were just not possible before. I would give anything to have been able to record my grandmother's stories and have shared them with my own children years later."

"The more we podcast and have our students create video clips or other digital storytelling projects, the more we need to teach storyboarding as part of the process. Being able to pre-visualize how your story will unfold is becoming a vital skill to have for storytellers."

"Kindergarten time is storytelling time: Listening to stories, telling stories, acting stories out, learning how to read your own stories and creating your own stories! Learning about a holiday, like Thanksgiving in the USA, is the perfect time to cloak the historical origin into a fascinating story for five and six year olds. Who is not excited about a story with Indians, interesting people named "Pilgrims", a ship named Mayflower and a huge feast with "yummy" food? (Can you tell I am in the "little people" mode)"

"There is a difference between Social Media IN schools and Social Media FOR schools. There is a difference between Social Media IN schools and Social Media FOR schools. While social media in schools deals primarily with policies around how to use (or not use) social media in the classroom with students, social media for schools is about storytelling and getting their stakeholders (teachers, students, administrators, parents, community) to spread these stories."

"Via Kim Cofino on Google Buzz, I found the Google SearchStories Video Creator. I see some great possibilities in the classroom for it. * Pre-reading activities * Book summaries * Introduction /background knowledge * Discussion starters"

"Inspired by Poetry, Performance & Taylor Mali and Beyond…, 8th grade Humanities teacher Shannon Hancock coached her students to create their own original "Mali Poem"and record a visual and vocal performance. I joined the class to give a brief overview of presentation design. I used selected slides from my slidedeck below to talk about image quality, typography, white spaces, metaphors, rules of third, etc."

"Experimenting with sketchnoting as note taking and as visual summaries and slide design has been an area of intense interest for me over the past six months. Completely inapt, as an analog "artist" on paper, the use of a stylus and the iPad Paper app by FiftyThree, have allowed me to experiment with color, form, design, and typography. The process of sketchnoting … has made jotting down ideas, connecting them, visually representing the brainstorming, thoughts and visions as I am creating visuals for blog posts or designing presentation slides, a more metacognitive process … has allowed me to think through a concept, as I am drawing it out ….made me consider options, perspectives of interpretation and points of view more intensely"

"Second graders at my school are studying animals in their science unit. They learned about the different characteristics of mammals, reptiles and birds. If their parents ask them tonight at the dinner table if they learned anything today, the students probably will tell them that they recorded a podcast today!"

"If you have not thought of podcasting with your younger elementary school students, I encourage you to think again. The first graders at my school had listened to the second grade podcast about animals, and had really enjoyed their story.They were especially thrilled that the second graders had received so many comments from teachers around the world. Believe it or not, but having an audience matters… even to 6 year olds."

"A teacher's heart smiles when students become creative, enthusiastic and take ownership of their work. This was the case with the 4th grade class at my school. Their classroom teacher asked me to introduce podcasts to her class, she and her students took it from there and RAN… with it…"

"With the wonderful small, but high quality, Flip Video cameras (and similar brands), it has become affordable (around US$ 150) to bring video production into the classroom."

"You must have noticed that I have been reading and re-reading "Curriculum 21″ by Heidi Hayes Jacobs. I have posted my first impressions and recommendation here and since then have joined and written about the companion Ning to the book here. I created a Flickr Curriculum 21 group to have a hub for images and videos of Curriculum21 teaching and learning examples."

"I completed the 365/2010 Photo Challenge- My biggest challenge was to upload and name each image correctly in order to be added to my Flickr 365/2010 set. Somehow some images got lost in the shuffle or are out of order. I will need to find a better technique for the next time. I might use a service like Shuttercal for the project."

"What is a techno-tale? A techno-tale is a digitally told story. There are many ways to create digital stories. "

"I am honored to be able to cross-post Stephen Wilmarth's blog post below on Langwitches. If you are interested to read more about Steve's International Experimental program at the Number One Middle School in Wuhan, China take a look at: Take a Peek into China's First 1:1 iPad Class Learning…Young Chinese Perspective Bringing a 1:1 iPad Program to China"

"As promised here is the follow up video to the trailer from my previous post Bringing a 1:1 iPad Program to China. I am back in the US now and am trying to sort through and make connections to my experiences from the past 2 weeks."

"Last year, while our first grade teacher was absent for an extended period of time, I spend a few sessions with them to read a book from the Magic Tree House series, Vacation under the Volcano, and then pulled students out in small groups to record them. You can read about the process and my reflection on this post "Podcasting with First Grade"."

"I posted a few weeks ago about the ongoing Teddy Bears Around the World (now in its fourth year) project. The project blog and hub can be be found at http://www.langwitches.org/blog/travel/teddybearsaroundtheworld/. I have created a How-to-Guide in order to articulate how and why to join such a project, to make participation easier and to facilitate the process of passing on the information. "

"As a former World Language teacher, I know of the importance of hearing the target language as much as possible. In order to internalize a new vocabulary word, you have to hear it at least 70+ times. By hearing I mean not only the sounds of the letters that make up the word, but also the context the word is embedded in… the melody of the sentence that embraces that word… the words that lead up to it and the words that follow it to make meaning and conclude the sentence."