Teaching is always new to me, and I am continually fascinated by my students’ creativity and learning. The opportunity to empower my students through thier involvement in community issues, and to help them find relevance in history by connecting it to today interests me; mixing this with new technological approaches makes it even more exciting for us all.
~Michelle Forman, High School Teacher
Digital storytelling can take a variety of forms, but what truly makes it a powerful medium? There are a variety of programs out there from MovieMaker to PowerPoint to Producer to Photostory 3. However, simply because there are free tools available certainly does not mean that we, as educators, need to use the newest and greatest software out there just because we can. While there is a place for it, I can’t tell you how many times I see students required to spit information out through MovieMaker instead of PowerPoint with the assumption that the student has learned more.
No, I believe that it is imperative to focus on the instructional content and that it is imperative that we search for avenues that allow students to be drawn into our educational environment. What is important to them and how does that intersect with the curriculum? This certainly does not mean that we only teach what the students want - absolutley not. There are many topics that our students may not be aware of or that they may not have thought through to which they can directly identify.
What amazes me is how involved students get when they start to investigate the stories around them. Take, for example, the immigration issue that came to the fore in the spring of 2006. Our students (here in Texas) became very engaged with this specific social issue - and teachers leapt on the opportunity to help enable students.
I did not have to stretch to find the connection between social justice and state standards. I did not spend my free time with my manuals and try to “fit” social justice in. Rather, I made the mandated curriculum “fit” into the social justice pedagogy and practice that I was using with my students on a daily basis. When we had to manipulate and compute very large (up to billions) and very small (decimals) numbers, we looked at census information, the number of Native Americans that were killed, infected with disease, or relocated to reservations, the amount of money corporations make as compared to the wages of the working class that those corporations employ and exploit.
~Laurence Tan, Teacher, Los Angeles
So, it’s time to get creative … find out how we can enable our students to change the world … and how that passion is tied to our history, the beauty of mathematics, fluid writing and reading, scientific history and knowledge and beyond.
The Beirut Spring writes about controversy over a public school named after a Lebanese poet. This is a great example of an issue where students can take/argue sides and then also look at how both sides are spewing inaccuracies. Local connections immediately come to mind, curriculum connections are a-plenty.