A lot of her ideas seemed fairly obvious (like doing book trailers or PSAs), but it was just good to hear that these kinds of projects can be implemented realistically into a regular classroom. One of the projects that stood out to me was how, as a part of their senior exit projects, small groups of twelfth-graders interviewed community members for a variety of purposes and created digital stories or presentations of those interviews. I love the idea of projects extending outside of the classroom and into the community. Many of her the positives about DST that she extolled were things we’ve talked about in class—created a democratic classroom, engaging students in high interest projects, and creating products that transcend the school day. She said that digital storytelling creates an “opportunity for students who may not always be class leaders in other situations to be seen in a new light.”
I also watched several of the book trailers on the University of Central Florida’s Digital Book Talk website. I really liked the Lord of the Flies one-- http://digitalbooktalk.com/?p=32 – because it seemed so characteristic of a teenager’s project. I could definitely see my students creating projects like these and loving every minute of it. Plus, as I’ve said before, their technological expertise is so amazing that I know most of them could put something like this together pretty quickly.
I did not happen to look at Pen Campbell's page this week, but it seems like her ideas were very similiar to Clifford Lee's who I watched. Both of the teachers talked about the importance of have the students go out into the community and conduct interviews and then turn that into a digital story. I liked the example Pen Campbell talked about. Having seniors interview members of their community can be very beneficial for them. In Clifford Lee's case he had his students interview immigrants to learn about immigrants who live in America. I think having students conduct interviews gives them a way to connect to the curriculum. They are going out and learning information for themselves from real people instead of just reading it in a textbook. This gives students real life examples and can help them learn the material on a deeper level. I enjoyed learning about these teachers and getting new ideas of how to use digital storytelling in my classroom.
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