SAS Digital Leaders Unite!

WHAT’S DNA? by Helen, Mona, John, and Shawn
I asked a student today if she was planning on submitting a film to the Shanghai Student Film Festival that will take place here on campus next month. She said, “No. I just like making stuff on the computer.” Too bad, she’s produced some very high quality work. In a wide range of classes, students are taking advantage of the technology available to them to share what they’ve learned about a given topic. From short films that illustrate an 8th Grader’s understanding of DNA to digital stories about a proud accomplishment, students and teachers are developing an important set of visual and media literacy skills. What I like most about lessons that involve some type of multimedia end-product (particularly digital stories) is how they shift the focus of the learning to the student where they become director and producer, not just passive consumers of disjointed bits of information. This is what I hope technology can do for schools. From Literacy in the Digital World by Kathleen Tyner (still my most referenced resource for educational technology issues):

The basic paradigm shift is from an educational emphasis on people as recipients of information and knowledge to an emphasis on people as participants in the creation of information and knowledge…The..choice we face nationally and globally is to decide what proportion of people will experience a level and kind of education that will enable them to participate as producers of knowledge as well as its consumers.

My Proudest Moment by Gordon

Making glitzy multimedia projects is rarely any teacher’s objective. What is often overlooked is that there is much to learn about the language of moving images that does not require assigning students to make a movie. These are a few simple activities that students and teachers can practice as part of a lesson that will develop important digital literacy skills for the future:

• Show only a short scene of a movie in class and point out basic camera angles
• Swap the soundtrack of a movie for one that alters the mood
• Use still images and ask students to assign captions (Comic Life is great for this!)
• Try a few of the exercises from the guide the British Film Institute published a few years ago

Visual Literacy researcher, Judy Baca summarized the importance of visual literacy: “In our increasing visually driven society, the ability to create and interpret imagery is as imperative as the abilities to read and write and to listen and speak. In addition to print, television, movies, and signs, young children deal on a daily basis with computers, educational video games, and the Internet-all media requiring a high degree of visual literacy to cope with a sometimes overwhelming amount of information. Baca’s studies also reminds us that the use of “visuals” touches other areas, including thinking and learning, and constructing meaning” (Baca, J., Braden, R., 1990, p.1)

As teachers and students here at SAS transition to a 1:1 laptop environment, I think we’ll see an increase in opportunities for students to create digital media products that share information. Initially, not all of them will be effective in communicating to their intended audience. Just because we put a computer in front of a student does not mean that it will teach them the visual literacy skills mentioned above. But now that the students have the access to tools for easily producing engaging digital media projects, we can now help students develop these essential skills for a digital future.

Find more videos like this on SAS Professional Development Net

A few months ago, I set a goal for this year to help produce 500 digital stories. I’m 75 digital stories closer to the finish line. With the Spanish digital stories and now this set, I’m at about 120. But it’s not about the numbers.

The most recent project involved the 6th Grade and focused on an accomplishment or proud moment. The project team consisted of four classroom teachers, myself and two very patient and flexible computer lab teachers. I met with the classroom teachers prior to launching the project and walked them through the process of completing a digital story. I’m a big fan of providing students with a template of what you expect them to complete, in addition to sharing with them a a finished digital story that illustrates what you expect them to do. For both Windows MovieMaker and iMovie (one class worked in the Mac Lab), I created a template where the students would open it and then have each step of the project illustrated for them in a short video. Still not sure how effective this was, but it cut down on requiring me to give a lot of direction instruction in MovieMaker and iMovie.

We met for 40 minutes each day. Spent about ten days writing our stories. Each student has a blog so we had them post a draft of their story to their blog and then told students to read and comment on each other’s stories. Not surprisingly, 6th graders are not the most effective story coaches. It’s still a  big challenge for a teacher to provide timely feedback to each student, but I find that this is what makes the difference between a narrated slideshow and an effective digital story. After students used Audacity to record their voice overs, they exported them as an mp3 and uploaded it to their blog to receive feedback on that. The feedback was sparse as many students were eager to move on to gathering images for their story and did not leave that many comments for the audio version of the story. The student’s voice is the most engaging part of a digital story. Unfortunately, schools are not quiet places. We don’t have that many quiet spaces and even with designating empty classrooms as quiet recording spaces, students still had some background noise in their voice overs. The kids can filter it out, but most adults stop listening once you hear some other voice in the background or the papers rustling. Next time, I think I’ll tighten that process by using a schedule with time slots. The teachers can help by listening to students read the first section of their story aloud and if they sound ready, the student’s name would be added to the recording queue. During the recording, we could pair each student with an adult or student who has just completed his recording who will oversee the process and ensure that the environment is quiet. The voice over is too valuable to leave to the student to handle alone.

I think a key component of this project was the flexibility of the
teachers. We had a window of about a month’s time for the project, but
everybody wanted quality work and extended the time for students to
write and receive feedback on their stories. I’d much rather spend more
time on the script writing and less on making the final movie look more
polished. Few students used music or transitions and I don’t think we
lost much. In total, I think the project took 6 weeks.

We uploaded the completed digital stories to our school YouTube channel. It was the easiest place to put them all (although I don’t like all of the Promoted Videos that come up when you try to watch a kid-friendly movie). More resources here on this wiki for Digital Storytelling.

What happens when you cram a posh hotel conference room with sixty Apple Distinguished Educators for a week of geeking out on their MacBooks? Add to that Singapore’s lovely sights and soothing sun rays and you can expect some exciting results.

I was fortunate to spend a majority of the time collaborating on a project with Amanda DeCardy and Jonathan Chambers, two of my colleagues from Shanghai American School. You would think that during the course of the school year we have several opportunities for professional development, but for technology PD we are often the ones providing the workshops, leaving little time for us to get together and pool our many talents, resources and ideas. We meet on a monthly basis and swap dozens of emails yet this is not the same as collaborating on a project that is meant for teachers to actually use with their students.

For several years, Apple has held week long institutes that provide invaluable opportunities for Mac-savvy educators to network, discuss educational technology challenges and often produce a project that showcases effective technology integration. I pitched the idea of having students collect stories from elders in their communities about how their city has changed. Amanda coined the project’s title of “Wisdom Lost, Wisdom Found” and that really provided the context for the project. With any digital storytelling project, providing a clear purpose for why you’re creating stories always helps. We were off and running from there. In the solution section of my thesis on digital storytelling, I suggested that providing teachers and students with a digital story template will improve the story teaching part of the project. Teachers and students need more than a few video tutorials on the technical side of creating a digital story. It only took me three years to finally follow through on this idea. In our project, we provide director’s cut style videos that help teachers and students prepare for the field interview. We created a scaffolded approach to the editing process, detailing three options (quick and simple, moderate editing, advanced editing) for creating the final digital story. Check out the project: Wisdom Lost, Wisdom Found. See also iTooth by David Gran and Mikey McKillip.

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Here are several examples of the power of Web 2.0 and people around the world tackling the challenge of using technology to make school relevant to students’ current and future lives. Recently, I shared with the 7th Grade several free tools that they can use to create their own animations. Many of these programs are on every computer in the school. Students, be sure to get permission to download and install any of these programs on your home computer.

FREE Animation Tools

FlipBook (online)

AniBoom (online)

Scratch (download Mac/PC)

Pivot Stick Figure (download PC only)

Pencil (download Mac/PC)

Phun (download Mac/PC)

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/-X-Eb_-O_KM" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

In a school of nearly 500 students and 50 teachers using over 350 computers, there are always plenty of tech-related questions. I think every teacher would love to have their classroom next to the IT department, but that’s rarely how schools are configured. While you can’t clone your building’s go-to-tech-person (I don’t like being referred to as “the tech guy”), every teacher does have access to Google. And that sometimes is even better.

Today’s situation. I was trying to import video footage into iMovie. Something I’ve done more than a hundred times. But today the computer would not recognize the camera. I remember something like this happening last year. Our school’s video camera records in PAL format instead of the NTSC format that I’m used to in the US. I spent 15 minutes trying to figure it out. Thought of asking the video teacher down the hallway, but he was in the middle of teaching a class. Where else can I turn to? Google. I enter “creating a PAL iMovie project” and get a list of links to forum replies from people who have experienced the same problem. Whenever you think you’ve got a unique computer problem, chances are very high that someone else in the world has solved it. Google can connect you with that person. I read over replies from three people and found my answer. And then I got even more than what I was looking for. Lennart Thelander created an empty PAL iMovie project and made it available for anyone to download. Three minutes later I launched it in iMovie 06 HD and resumed importing the footage for the project.

When I needed to learn how to create a green screen effect in Final Cut Pro, I Googled it and found an excellent YouTube tutorial from a college student that taught me exactly what I needed in just 20 minutes.

We tell students that technology is supposed to help them think creatively and critically about how to solve problems. I think that we need to push this same message to teachers. It’s not enough to put technology in teachers’ hands. We need to teach them how to use it to be more effective educators. That’s a thorny issue, but I see teaching them how they can learn from Google and the vast resources out there on the web as a large part of my job, much larger than being “the tech guy.”

Google Docs – another reason why Google should be a teacher’s best friend. Even though they’re still working out some bugs, I’m excited about where this set of tools is headed. This week, I wanted to create a quiz for students to take. Sure I could have used Survey Monkey, but I was curious to see what Google had to offer. In the Documents section of your Google account, create a New document and select Form. Very easy quiz option. Easy to analyze results. And of course there’s a great YouTube video tutorial that someone has created to help walk you thru the steps of creating one.

Using Google Forms to Create a online Quiz

Google Docs in Plain English

It’s been back to school here for over three weeks. And it feels like it’s been three months. That’s the international school life they say. One of our current challenges has been transitioning to Word 2007. Here is a quick cheat sheet I found helpful: word-quick-reference-2007.pdfYouTube also has many excellent tutorials that walk you through the new “ribbon” navigation tool as well as many time-saving tips.[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/L5IL0Zra0XU" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /][kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/4uGsnnEe3EM" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]TeacherTube also has a great collection of video tutorials on many topics. You can download these as well.