Documenting "Through My Eyes"

This is a post that was done during the TCEA conference and I had trouble putting the pictures in. Now I am putting it together.

Belaire High School
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

This was my favorite presentation for many reasons. First of all they started by getting us out of our seats. Next they did not let tech glitches get in the way of what they were saying. When their movie halted part way they just went on talking and did question and answer. People had lots of questions.

Finally, they learned something at the conference last year and then went home and tried it and presented it this year! It was REAL. Here are my notes and some pictures of the session. The session started out with all of us closing our eyes and following some directions on folding and tearing a piece of paper which we were given. It was a great example of diversity. We all followed the same directions, but came up with something very different. It got us out of our seats and participating. What they did was to take a group of students and have them create a digital story where they asked questions about themselves and all answered them.

What happened was that in the process they really learned to know the students and understand them better. They found out how important it was to build relationships. They did this with the 9th grade academy. There was a diversity of students and this helped them to learn more about them. Students created personal documentaries. about their in school and out of school experiences. Their initial idea was to have each of the students create their own documentary, but they realized in time that the best way was to work together and create one video. Started with 15 students selected by teachers. Very few directions. Ended up with 8 kids. The students had to take several workshops to prepare before even writing a script:

• Film Script Terminology
• Analyze documentaries
• Create Storyboards and Scripts
• Complete Creating Personal Documentaries packet
• Develop storyboard and script
• Conduct interviews

Then they wrote scripts and recorded video and audio segments and gathered other artifacts. They used windows movie maker to make the documentary. They started out with the question: Through our eyes, Who are we? This was done after school and during elective classes Kids were really motivated and interested. Teachers willing to put in extra time and effort. Worth it for them because they could better relate to kids. Took about a month to create the documentary. Whole process took since September. Someone asked about censorship.

They did not have big problems, but they were able to take things that were not appropriate in the editing process. There was benefit both in the process and the product. The materials that they used can be found online at the TRLD site and also at their school


Idea: Doing this with staff would help students to get to know you better. The kids built a bond with each other as well as the teachers they worked with. Better than getting to know you sheets. Did other students see the documentary? Some, but not all because of scheduling. Poverty role playing. BelAire High School Baton Rouge Louisianna http://ebrschools.org

CONNECTING KIDS WITH BOOKS USING TECHNOLOGY

The second session that I went to was a practical explanation of using technology to connect all kids to books. It was well prepared. The presenter had several videos to illustrate the teaching methods. I do not have a picture for this session.

The presenter was Joy Heatland from Iowa IDEA 2004 required that text resources be provided to kids with disabilities. Some kids need different presentations in order to comprehend text.

In this session Joy explained how they created participatory parts of a story. They created fold out quizzes that they added to the bottom of book pages. This was also digital and could be shown along with the book pages on the computer.

She mentioned NIMAS-putting text into a format so that it can be manipulated (braille, audio, large print, etc) and how their project fit in. Narrow definition of NIMAS-Copyright note added to materials that have been adapted. AIM consortium-Accessible Instructional Materials

They moved from Traditional Literacy Instruction to Dialogic Reading (conversation about a book). Child becomes the teller of the story, Adult becomes audience. Dr. Grover Whitehurst designed this. Kids learn most from books when they are actively involved with them. Helps with language development.

This worked well, but the missing link was Support for Special Needs Students. Universal Design Features were missing. They added adapted dialogic reading, technology. Showed video example of adapted dialogic reading. The teacher used technology to allow ALL kids to participate. She has both the picture book open and a laptop with more than one mouse so that students can use to manipulate the book. The teacher used the same kinds of strategies, but accommodations for access.

They did three years of research. See this web page for her presentation which has a nice table comparing methods. The slides can be done with Boardmaker also, but they used Classroom Suite. Technology allows for lots of different ways to meet different kids needs. Benefits are Voice Output- click and hear, Highlight when read motivation, attention, memory vocabulary-especially for emotions.

Technology, Reading and Learning Diversity

I am in San Francisco at the TRLD Conference. I am going to post some pictures that I saw and edited notes.


The Keynote yesterday was David Warlick. The thing that I was reminded of in his presentation was his site http://landmarkproject.com. At this site you can find lots of great resources. There are the electronic handouts, but one of the most amazing things is the library of links. There are pointers to tons of raw data that can be used for all kinds of things (inaugural addresses from all presidents). He made the point that today everything is numbers and so it can be manuipulated in various ways.

His talk was titled, "Redefining Literacy"
Important Points:

• Teachers should be MASTER LEARNERS. It is possible to learn something new every day.
• Handouts are online-tags to use redefine, literacy and Warlick.
• Showed his office in Second Life. His Avatar is Suriawan Dato.
• Many print documents are moving to being only online-example of Christian Science Monitor.
• There is so much information available now. Most of it NOT printed on paper.
  
• More and more of our communication is going to be virtual.
• Showed wearable computing. There is a jacket available right now for $650.
• We are not preparing our kids for OUR future, but for theirs. However, we know almost nothing about what we are preparing our children for.

What do kids need to be learning today to be ready for a future we don’t understand.

• We need to stop integrating technology,.
• We need to teach them to be literate.
• being willing and ready to ask questions, Who did this, why
• investigate (many skills about how to find info)-example www.martinlutherking.org, done by http://stormforce.org
• Learning how to read is more critical than ever
  

Kids now GOOGLE the information, they need to be able to evaluate what they find
Definition of Literacy expanded-Using information to accomplish goals

What about numbers?
Use Spreadsheet to help students make math tell its story.


Tag Crowd.com (70 most used words-example of inaugural addresses) Possible to compare languages. Can be done because the full information landscape is made out of numbers.

Musical notes are made of numbers. It is possible to translate the numbers into other things now (visual-notes of different types) Working the numbers.

What about Writing?
20/80 curve. - The long tail. Now it is possible to self publish and sell books online. It used to be that Publishers controlled what would sell. Now it doesn't matter. Even those who only sell one copy can be published and made available.

Kids need to become good communicators in multi-media. They also need to know about ethical use of information. Respecting ownership, accuracy and infrastructure.

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn." Alvin Toffler

Information competes for attention. Kids need to learn how to write , create an image, a video, music, that communicates.
Example of video essay: look here for handouts http://davidwarlick.com/wordpress/?p=330