Digital Stories, Google Docs, and posters. Post #2, course #5

Last week at school, I think my students ran the gambit of ed tech over the last 20 years. First, the digital stories from the Korat trip: this was actually more than a week ago, but with all the absences we've had in the middle school, technical difficulties, etc., it's only been within the last 10 or so days that everybody has successfully posted or at the very least turned a file in to my via flash drive.

The Korat Digital story assignment is constantly evolving. Three years ago it was a highly structured social studies assignment based around the five themes of geography.



source: http://pkab.wordpress.com/2008/07/26/peta-konsep-5-tema-geografi/

Over the last couple of years, it has evolved into a more personal reflection based on students' interests and "aha"s they might have had on the trip. Click here for some examples from a colleague's students. I've posted a couple from my own students below.




and



In general, I was satisfied with how this project went from beginning to end. What is not necessarily evident in the final product is the amount of "tweaking" that went into the directions. We (my team and I) are learning that if a visual story of some sort is to come to life, the student instructions must give the chance for them to investigate and display their own creativity and interests in a why that lends itself to visual production. Those instructions might well be different from what's given to students if the end result is to be a written essay, or even a PowerPoint.

That all probably gets at the heart of some issues involving technology use at school. Maybe we don't all realize, think about, or care about what a massive shift is taking place. Maybe frustration from some camps regarding technology is that an excellent, veteran teacher who motivates her students and creates fantastic learning activities suddenly tries to shift to students demonstrating their learning in "web twenty" way and then realizing the "web twenty" product is basically crap. Imagine if for years students in a critical writing class had been producing literary analysis essays of all sorts and then suddenly the students were asked to basically follow the same rubric and syllabus but produce a digital story comparing two short stories rather than writing a comparative essay. I've come to fully understand that the teacher, instruction(s), rubrics, discussions, the whole thing, needs to be different if students are to do something meaningful and demonstrate learning with technology as part of their regular classroom life.