Filed under: Change Agent, Instructional Leader | Tags: Assessment, Curriculum21, digitalstorytelling, project based learning
As I mentioned in an earlier post, Heidi Hayes-Jacobs suggests that the first step that teachers take it to adopt a 21st century assessment. She suggests that you begin by changing one per semester. Let’s consider digital story telling as a 21st century assessment.
So, what would it take for you, as a teacher to change one of your current summative assessments into a digital storytelling project?
Identifying Related Standards and Benchmarks
When looking at your curriculum, can you find defined skills and knowledge that students can be assessed on using digital storytelling? I bet that you can find standards and benchmarks in your subject matter, and your information technology and library curricula. By using all three you’re providing students with exposure to a variety of 21st century skills and knowledge.
Take a look at the enGauge 21st Century Skills that were identified by the Digital Directors Guild.
enGauge® 21st Century Skills: Literacy in the Digital Age
Digital-Age Literacy
- Basic, scientific, economic, and technological literacies
- Visual and information literacies
- Multicultural literacy and global awareness
- Inventive Thinking
- Adaptability and managing complexity
Self-direction
- Curiosity, creativity, and risk taking
- Higher-order thinking and sound reasoning
- Effective Communication
Teaming, collaboration, and interpersonal skills
- Personal, social, and civic responsibility
- Interactive communication
- High Productivity
Prioritizing, planning, and managing for results
- Effective use of real-world tools
- Ability to produce relevant, high-quality products
Digital Storytelling is not just for English and Social Studies
The Digital Directors Guild has suggestions for all subject matters.
Science – How about time lapsed photography to tell the story of an experiment? Maybe an infomercial or documentary?
Math – A visual representation of a complex problem or the story of how a student mastered their learning? Maybe a documentary on a math related topic?
Art – The use of photos to tell and artistic story or a documentary describing a historical art topic.
The possibilities are endless.
Determining the Appropriate Tool
Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano has written Digital Storytelling Tools for Educators and in it she identifies 7 free tools that can be used for storytelling. As part of the process, students need to determine if they will tell the story with video, images, text or audio. Once that is determined, the appropriate tool can be chosen. This is something that our academic technology person can help you and your students with selecting the right tool and learning it. Richard Byrne in Free Technology for Teachers provides lots of links to related sites. Alan Levine at CogDog blog has identified 50+ ways to tell a digital story.
Researching Examples
You can find examples at Tech Teachers.
What else will you need to help students create digital stories?
Filed under: Change Agent, Instructional Leader | Tags: change, Educational Leadership, Homework, Learning, project based learning
I find myself constantly looking at practices in school and asking, “How will that change in a 1 to 1 setting?” A recent article by Bambi Betts entitled Do Your Homework got me thinking about how homework will change. Now, I understand that it won’t change overnight, but I’m optimistic that it will be transformed. Let’s start by getting rid of the term “homework”. The name just doesn’t seem appropriate for many reasons.
1. Let’s replace “work” with something related to learning. While the tasks may not be easy, work just doesn’t seem to be the right term. Students may be Skyping with peers or experts half way around the world, selecting online resources that help with their learning, recording instrumental rehearsals to playback and use to improve performance, creating producing screen plays, and other interesting activities.
2. Since the learning will take place anywhere, let’s forget about “home”. With portability the learning takes place anywhere. In the coffee shop, on the bus, in the mall, at the pool, at the vacation resort and various other places. Anyone have a interesting story on where students were learning?
3. The new term will somehow need to communicate that the activities will be less teacher driven, and more student driven. We talk a lot about student centered classrooms and how students will tailor design the learning experiences to fit their needs. If they think that they can reach the target by watching and responding to a podcast or Skyping with native Spanish speakers, then so be it. The learning principles that Betts mentions, “independent and unguided learning; that learners learn differently and at different paces…”, support a student centered approach.
Betts goes on to say,
It would be student-driven as much as possible, increasingly so as students acquire the skill. Consider a 10-year old learning to play football. Does she limit herself to what the coach told her to practice? Over time, with increasingly less guidance, she learns what she needs to practice.
Anyone have ideas on new terminology?
Photo Credit: Is this your homework, Larry?
Filed under: Instructional Leader | Tags: 21st Century Schools, change, Educational Leadership, Learning, North Carolina Curriculum, project based learning, Technology Support, Textbooks, Web 2.0
This past week I was helping my 4th grade daughter with her social studies homework and I noticed that her textbook, Macmillan/McGraw-Hill textbook, North Carolina, was published in 2003. She was working on Chapter 11 which covers the state, local and national governments. Now, it doesn’t matter much that the general and historic information is from 2003, but the book shows photos of the then senators, Elizabeth Dole and John Edwards. The publishers are probably happy when people like Donnie Harrison, Wake County Sheriff (his photo is in the book as well), are re-elected. It really got to me that one of the mini activities was to have the students read a pie graph showing “Where Each State Tax Dollar Goes”, from 2001.
So, what would it be like for a teacher to not pick up books from the book room at the beginning of the year? What if he/she just said, “I’m going to use the book as a guide and use current resources and tools to wing it”? It may be liberating. It will likely be difficult because ‘winging it’ will require providing students with access to technology and the web.
Fortunately (so I thought), a couple of days after our homework session I noticed through eSchoolNews that Pennsylvannia had started a Digital Learning Library. I searched in the 4th grade curriculum for activities/resources on government. I was a bit dissapointed to find the following:
- A link to an assignment where students create a mobile showing the 3 branches of government using paper, yarn and colored pencils.
Click the link at the bottom of each page
- A Foundations of American Democracy Crossword Puzzle
- Lesson documents from the Oswego City School District
- More textbook like documents on State and Local Documents
- This Word Search on The Declaration of Independence
- This lesson on government leaders that states that Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer are currently the senators from New York and that George Pataki is the “present” Governor of New York.
While these materials are linked to the state standards and benchmarks and they are easily accessible, they are very similar to what the text offers. The information is dated and, in terms of thinking skills, these are low level thinking skills. It appears to be more of the same.
I can see that it is going to be some serious work to provide students with meaningful learning experiences without using the textbook. What about these options.
- Create a Resource on Local, State and National Governments for the Public – Take the structure of the textbook and the digital library resources and have the students create a wiki that can be viewed/edited by the rest of the world. This would guarantee that the information would be current.
Include:
- Covering the Primary Elections – At the time of the unit there were primary elections going on in North Carolina. What if the students embarked on a project to cover the primaries with a focus on local, state and federal governments? The early voting polls were open for 10 days and the site was very close to school. What if the kids went and taped interviewed of volunteers, voters and candidates during this election period? The audio or video clips could then be edited and compiled to share with other 4th grade students around the world. The students could have researched the candidates, just like voters did, to learn more about the issues.
- Analyzing State Budget Figures – Turns out that the it’s a bit more difficult than I thought to find out details on current state of North Carolina government budget figures. Maybe that is a good thing. With help, the students could locate the information, compile it into a spreadsheet and then present it in the same type of pie chart that the book uses.
- Web Resources – Look for links to news reports, videos and other media that relates to the topic.
If I was a 4th grader, I know which I would prefer. Too bad that the teachers and the students don’t have the tools to provide these types of learning experiences on a daily basis.
Filed under: Instructional Leader, Leadership, Visionary | Tags: 21st Century Schools, Collaboration, Curriculum, Leadership, project based learning, Web 2.0
Over the past few weeks I have been working with David Sinclair from Taipei American School on a presentation that we will be giving at the EARCOS Administrator’s Conference in Manila. The presentation it titled, Leadership for 1:1 Laptop Initiatives. 
During this time we have been using Google Docs to share information, ideas, links to sites and blogs, and photos. On several occasions we have 
skyped to talk through ideas and we are using 
Prezi as our presentation tool. All of these provide us with access to real time changes 24/7.
OK, so none of this sounds that earth shattering these days, but there was a moment the other night when I realized that this is so COOL. I was out sitting on my deck working on the presentation with my mini laptop, listening to the sounds of crickets chirping and the waves rolling onto the sand. In the middle of my work David skypes me to discuss the presentation. We are both reviewing our notes and the presentation online and making changes as we go. Meanwhile, my wife, who is helping us with the presentation design, is in another room on another mini editing the presentation. All three of us were collaborating and we weren’t even in the same room. David was even thousands of miles away. When we were talking he said, “what’s that noise?” so I told him about the crickets and the waves. Not a bad location to get some work done.
In today’s world there is no reason why our students should not have these experiences frequently. Our job as educators is to create the opportunities for them to collaborate with students and/or experts from around the world. Aside from the cost for the machines and access to the internet, the rest of the tools are free.
Filed under: Instructional Leader | Tags: Leadership, MUN, project based learning
Cross posted on Leader Talk.
Official Logo
I just happened to read Bob Lenz’s post entitled Project Learning Creates a Win-Win Situation on Edutopia and at the end he poses the question, How has project learning revolutionized your classroom or school? This weekend our school is hosted the 6th Annual Malaysian Model United Nations and our campus was buzzing with excitement. Our high school Model United Nations club organizes this event for 250 middle school students. After last year’s conference THIMUN recognized it as an officially affiliated event. While the thousands of hours of preparation drains our advisors and students, the final event gives our entire school community a boost. Every year we are amazed by the high quality of the work that the students do to create a first class event for 250 customers. The educational experience of attending a MUN conference is far different than the experience a student gets from actually organizing and a conference and it’s almost impossible to create in a class. A sample of tasks includes:
- Promoting the event through the website
- Fielding queries from perspective directors
- Processing payments from delegates
- Providing participants with assignments and resources in advance
- Arranging for a guest speaker and entertainment for the opening ceremony
- Arranging transportation from airport to hotel, hotel to school, etc.
- Recruiting and preparing committee chairs from our school and other schools
- Troubleshooting for a variety of reasons
- Running the actual conference
- Producing the daily newspaper and conference video
For our school, this is the greatest project based learning project that we offer and there were approximately 150 students involved in organizing the event. On Monday those 150 students will be tired and worn out but they will all have smiles on their faces. We will all celebrate their accomplishments and the authentic learning that occurred. These successes will only help us move forward toward our vision.
Members of MYSPY Newspaper Staff
