With the help of our 21st Century Literacy Specialist, Ms. Cofino, this class has brought their stories to life by taking their written pieces from their Writer’s Workshop unit and turning them into digital stories using Garage Band and iMovie. Now that their movies are digital, Ms. Bellone was able to publish them on the video sharing website, YouTube, on a channel just for her class called Team Bellone (no personally identifying information has been shared).

Now you can watch all of their excellent digital stories online and even leave a comment or two! Here’s one just to get you started:

Being able to share their work with a global audience is one of the most motivating and engaging ways to help students get excited about writing. Most of these stories have already been viewed over 50 times! How many of your writing pieces have been viewed by 50 people around the world? And that’s only the beginning!

This digital storytelling project also introduced these wonderful grade 4 students to two new technology tools: Garage Band (used for recording your voice) and iMovie (used to combine audio and visual elements). Both of these tools are standard on all Apple computers and are just right for elementary school students to learn more about audio and video editing.

Being able to hear (and see the audio input of) their own voices telling their story helped the students understand how important emphasis, emotion and tone are in their speaking and presenting voices. Having the opportunity to practice this type of animated speaking is great preparation for both face-to-face presentations as well as further technology-based work.

Learning how to combine audio and video input into one smooth, exciting digital story, is a great way to tap into students’ creativity and higher order thinking skills. They had to figure out just how long every picture should be so that each one perfectly matched to their previously recorded audio. Many students even had the time to add a title and credits to make their story more like a movie.

Becoming active producers of creative content in a digital format is a critical aspect of 21st century literacy and an essential experience for all students at ISB. This project is part of the foundation that students need to understand the potential, impact, and appropriate use of technology tools for communication and creativity.

It’s hard to believe this was their very first experience with digital storytelling! We’re already waiting for more amazing stories from Team Bellone!

The video demonstrates the different ways that we are able to access, use and create information in the digital age. Professor Wesch focuses on the needs of our students learning in this digital world, compared to our own experiences with more traditional management of paper-based information. As you might expect, this video prompted some interesting discussion. Here are a few highlights:

• First and foremost we discussed the need for students to learn how to filter the massive amounts of information that we all have at our fingertips for everything from accuracy to bias to relevance to date of publication.
• We talked about the need for students to be not only seekers of information, but also content creators. Their world revolves around creation (think YouTube), we need to be providing these same kinds of experiences in the classroom to teach them how to appropriately use these tools for educational purposes.
• Jeff shared some effective searching strategies for using Google more effectively. You can watch a short video of similar (plus more!) very easy, very effective searching tips directly from Google, or download this one-page help sheet.

We also spent some time introducing our new library catalog system, Destiny. Tara shared some special tricks on how to do a visual search (perfect for our younger learners), as well as how to search the pre-screened websites (organized by age-level appropriateness) called WebPath Express, that comes as part of the Destiny catalog.

Thank you to all of the parents who took time out of their busy day to attend this monthly session! We so enjoy learning with you and sharing new and exciting ideas from our ISB 21st Century Literacy Team!

Our next meeting will be February 4, 2009 at 7:30 am in the Learning Hub Project Zone. Topic: Social Networking: This session will be an introduction to the uses of social networking in the classroom, as well as a demonstration of some of the social networks that our students regularly use (for example Club Penguin).

We hope to see you there!