Digital Story Telling in the 21st Century

I found this great quote in a power point on SlideShare called, Capturing Stories, Capturing Lives: The Power of Digital Story Telling, by David Jakes:

 I think this quote sums up this course, Teaching With Technology and Digital Story Telling.  Throughout this course we have discussed becoming 21st century teachers to prepare ourselves for our 21st century students.  Digital story telling is reading and writing instruction for future generations. There is a wide variety of resources for different grades and subject areas for teachers to use in their classroom.  Digital story telling uses images, text, recorded audio narration, video clips and or sound to create stories. Teachers can use digital story telling to motivate students to write and read since it uses multimedia that they are familiar with. With digital story telling, students are able to express themselves, share their "voice", share their stories globally, and become effective communicators with technology. 21st century classrooms should give students the opportunity to use digital story telling to create stories with images, photographs, sound clips, recorded narrations, and videos.  Like the quote says, students that do not have this knowledge are considered illiterate since technology is a part of our everyday lives.  If you do not know how to use it to it's full benefit, then you will not succeed in the future.  Like Dr. Smirnova said, "Teachers need to think outside the four walls of the classroom". As teachers, we have to enrich our students learning and prepare them for the future.  Digital story telling is the new way to share stories, save memories, and present information.

Daniel Meadows defines digital stories as “short, personal multimedia tales told from the heart.” The beauty of this form of digital expression, he maintains, is that these stories can be created by people everywhere, on any subject, and shared electronically all over the world. Meadows goes on to describe digital stories as “multimedia sonnets from the people” in which “photographs discover the talkies, and the stories told assemble in the ether as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, a gaggle of invisible histories which, when viewed together, tell the bigger story of our time, the story that defines who we are."
-- from the University of Houston digital storytelling site 

Please take a look at my WOW presentation on Digital Story Telling in the 21st Century for more information.

WOW Presentation

Reflecting on Teaching With Technology

This course has not only helped me become comfortable with using Web 2.0 tools, but it has also taught me how to reflect on my own learning and challenge myself to learn how to use new tools in my  classroom. This up coming school year, I plan on using a blog to communicate with parents and showcase students' work. I also plan on putting my monthly newsletter on my website and wiki. I also would like to try to use Smilebox to send out announcements, invitations and newsletters for my class. I also plan on using Engrade for my grade book and I will send out the link to my co-workers.  When I first started this course, I already had a website, wiki and blog for my class but I only used the basics applications and I was not very comfortable updating or adding to them.  I now feel really comfortable with using these Web 2.0 tools and I look forward to remodeling my current pages and showing them to my student's parents at our parents as partners night in September. This course has also taught me about social bookmarking, social networking, Google docs, iGoogle, twitter, youtube, podcasting, digital footprints, just to name a few.  I feel like I am walking away from this course with a wealth of knowledge about technology and how to apply it in my classroom.  This course has me looking forward to a new school year and new start.  I feel refreshed and ready to begin a new year....but not until we have one more month of summer vacation:) Thank you Dr. Smirnova for sharing some of your wisdom with me!

 

Electronic Portfolios and Student Self-Evaluations

I feel like these two topics can go hand in hand.  As a first grade teacher, I often conference with my students during writer's workshop about thier writing.  During this process I ask them to reflect on their writing and tell me something they did great and something they could improve on. At a first grade level some students can express this to me and some have trouble reflecting on their work.  I think student self reflection will look different in each grade level, although I think it will also look different in each classroom when you use differentiated instruction.  The skill of reflecting is not easy, it is not easy for adults and it is difficult for some students to understand and take seriously.  I think having students create electronic portfolios to show off their work, will help them reflect on the process of picking pieces of writing to put in their e-portfolios. Making decisions and justifying them will be a great lesson to teach students how to reflect.  I plan on attempting to make one electronic portfolio in my first grade classroom this year and asking each student to pick on piece of writing to put in it per quarter.  I will work on a class portfolio because I will have to help each student and this will be a great start for me.  I will then teach student how to reflect on their choices and share their reflections with the class.

Internet Safety, Digital Safety and Copyrights....

After reading the 5 parts of the copyright series I questioned myself and all the work I have done an do on the computer sharing and presenting information.  Did I break a copyright law? Did I give credit to right people? Did I give credit my sources correctly?  After reading the Digital Literacy by Google, I thought about all the rules and tips that would of been useful when I first started joining all these website accounts and using Web 2.tools.  I found this website very useful and easy to use.  I plan on using it when I share with my colleagues in September all that learned about Web 2.0 because this information is easy to read and it explains all the tools with examples. I also liked the wiki with internet safety tips. I plan on introducing my students to the tools that are appropriate for first grade along with the safety rules.  I think that it is important to use the correct language with your students so they can be safe on the internet at home and in school. I think that even those of us that have used the internet for many years, should review these rules, policies, and tips because they are updates as often as technology is, and we know that is A LOT!

Team Newburgh's Reflection on Parent's Newsletter

Here is a link to our Parent's Newsletter. 
This newsletter was created by Liam, Janeen & Gina.

1) Why is communication important between teachers and parents?
Communication is important between parents and teachers for various reasons. First and foremost, a teacher spends significant amount of time with a parent’s child over the course of a school year.In some cases, if you want to know what’s up with the child, the teacher is an excellent source because they see them consistently. Opening up the lines of communication for the teacher and parent establishes a relationship where the main goal is the child’s progress and academic growth. It is important for both the parent and teacher to feel they can communicate with one another when it comes to concerns regarding the student.  If there has been a recent stressful event in the child’s life, the teacher should be informed so that he/she can take into consideration that information when observing the child’s academic performance and behavior. If a student is experiencing any problems they can be addressed more efficiently and effectively when the lines of communication are open. Additionally, the expectations for both the parent and teacher could be laid out so that both parties can work together to help support the child in a positive way.

2) In what way will you communicate with your students’ parents?
We will communicate with our students’ parents through our newsletter, class website, blog and wiki.  Students will be able to show off their work on the class wiki and blog and then it will illicit conversations at home when parents ask, “What did you do in school today?” Today many parents have the internet on their phones, which makes it easy to check on the class websites.  Many parents work long hours and this is a way for them to stay informed of what their child is doing in school.  We also agree that all these Web 2.0 pages are great, but it is also important to continue to meet in person when needed and to make phone calls when certain situations arise.

3) What new communications software applications would be fun to try to communicate with parents?
We think that it would be fun to use a program like Smilbox to make weekly or monthly newsletters for our class.  It would also be convenient use Skype if a parent cannot make a parent teacher conference. A class blog page will be a lot of fun too because parents and family members can comment on students’ work and that gives students a purpose and audience for their work.

4) What software did you use, why did you choose to use it?
We chose Smilebox first because it was free. It also had a nice layout and the colors were inviting. It was easy to use and very helpful. This is a site that we can each use individually, outside of this class, both professionally and personally, for a number of different reasons.
We can make newsletters, invitations, greetings, photo albums, and scrapbook all on one site. Plus, you can share in so many different ways such as through facebook, blogs, and e-mail, just to name a few.


5) How was it to collaborate on this project?
This project was a bit more difficult than the other projects because we all had hectic schedules this week and we learned that these programs do not save on the site, rather they save on a computer.  Therefore we all had to meet together to work on this and use the same computer.  The actual process of creating the newsletter was fun and easy. We thought it would be fun to make it a school newsletter and we could each add an article from our classroom. We all enjoyed this project and will all try to use this program in our classroom and in our lives.

6) What would you do differently if you did a Class Newsletter again?
We said that we would try to find another program that would allow us to work on the newsletter, save it to the site, and then work on it again at another location.  Teachers are busy and it would be a lot more convenient if it would save and we could finish it at another time.

Beyond the Bubble

After reading the article Beyond the Bubble Test: How will we measure Learning in the Future?, I totally agree with their point that standardized tests can be a waste of time and that they do not measure real skills.  As a first grade teacher I do not have to practice and administer these state tests in my classroom, but I do here my coworkers complain about them in the faculty room.  They waste valuable teaching time that could be spent learning new things and students could be using this time to create projects using Web 2.0 tools.  I recently was watching a TV show called Friday Night Lights, and in the show a character was on a job interview for an assistant dean of a college. In her interview she told them that she did not want to focus on the test score because it did not show you who the students were and she wanted to meet with all the students face to face and get to know them that way instead of by their test scores. I agree that a new testing system done with technology would better meet the needs of our students of the 21st century.  These tests will be performance based and will assess real world situations.  I think this is a great change for education, a change that needs to be done.

My Software Critique

I came across this easy online grading website called http://www.engrade.com.  This website was very teacher friendly.  Adding students the class roster was easy and there are a lot of Apps to use including attendance, assignments, tests/quizzes, seating charts, a place for comments and discussions, calendar and a reading list.  Engrade.com also allows you to put the total of points an assignment is worth and then you can record what the students got correct.  Engrade.com then listed the percentage and it would average all grades so far.  This app would be very helpful to teachers when they are asked how a student is doing and it will make doing report cards very easy. This website also allows teachers to work on grades at school and at home with out having to take anything home. If I could change something about this website, I might want to be able to give my students a √, √+ or a √-, for some assignments rather than a number grade since I teach first grade.  I think this tool would be useful to some parents for them to see how their child is doing is school and this way there are no surprises at a parent teacher conference.  However, I was not able to figure out how a parent would see their child's grades.  I also think that this tool may put a lot of pressure on students to get good grades because they know that their parents can check out all their grades for every assignment and assessment.

Here is a sample of what my class grade book looks like from http://www.engrade.com