Digital Storytelling

Digital storytelling is the act of using technology resources to create a story on the computer. Digital storytelling allows educators to teach children the elements of storytelling and topics in a way that allows them to be creative and enjoy the lesson. The stories can be created by all students on any subject. The student can find media pieces, images, audio, text, and or music to create a digital story. Digital storytelling motivates children to express themselves and their learning in creative ways. It can be done on programs like imovie. I really appreciate that the digital storytelling challenges the children in new ways while teaching them basics about writing skills that will be essential for their future. Digital storytelling is beneficial in the classroom in a multitude of ways. It is an innovative way for children to develop their abilities as a writer, establish voice, confidence, and structured, organized and sequenced writing.

Here are some of the useful websites I found on digital storytelling:

http://www.infotoday.com/MMSchools/jan02/banaszewski.htm

http://electronicportfolios.com/digistory/

http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/

Global Kids Connect

One way of connecting with global education communities is through the organization Global Kids Connect found at, http://www.globalkidsconnect.org/. This organization has a program that connects students in the United States to students in Afghanistan and Tajikistan through collaboration projects, media and school based initiative to build global citizenship and youth philanthropy. The objective is to provide future leaders and world citizens with knowledge, skills, and values for positive action and participation in an interconnected world. Right now the organization collaborates with these regions and posts activity ideas on how to increase global citizenship in the classroom. These activities include: soccer around the world, what's in a name, and culture wheel. These activities show the results from the classroom in Tajikistan. The organization is currently working on building a digital community with kids around the world through greeting cards, interactive chat rooms, email and much more. I found this website through google search. Children can learn about the history and culture of the students in Afghanistan and Tajikistan. One lesson plan I really liked that connects all of the children is the soccer activity. In this activity both classrooms use a map and the internet to find and label the winners of the world cup games for every year and the country the game was held in. One last thing I found really cool on the website is a database of different classrooms from all over the world. The class posts a list of any 10 things that make them smile. Everyone can look up all the classes from around the world to see what makes them smile.

I went to the blog, Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wes Fryer. I read a couple of his blogs on how to perform tasks on different technologies, such as undo typing on an iphone, or create and edit video on imovie. I began to watch a video that was posted on the website called, John Medina's Keynote on Youtube: Brain Rules at the ISTE 2011 conference. He discusses a learning environment that is directly composed to what the brain is made to do. The 12 brain rules for thriving at work, home, and school, as described by John Medina are:

1. Exercise boosts brain power

2. The human brain evolved, too

3. Every brain is wired differently

4. We don't pay attention to boring things

5. Repeat to remember

6. Remember to repeat

7. Sleep well, think well

8. Stressed brains don't learn the same way

9. Stimulate more of the senses

10. Vision trumps all other senses

11. Male and female brains are different

12. We are powerful and natural explorers

I thought these were great rules to keep in mind while teaching young children. Knowing how the brain works is important to creating an environment that supports learning. Another blog I looked back at was, Always Learning by Kim Cofino. Her most recent post discusses how she uses blogs as a global classroom where children create their own blogs to connect with learners around the world. The children use the blogs to share and reflect on their learning. The children share pieces of work that were important to them and assess their learning to meet their goals through the blog. The children used the blog to display their own portfolios with their self-assessments. It sounds like a great way to encourage student involvement, peer assessment, self assessment, and home-school collaboration. The last blog post I read was at, Graham Wegner Open Educator blog. In the post Wegner discusses the issues of privacy online and surveillance offline with the easy access to capture videos with smart phones and quickly posting them online. Being able to do this can often backfire in negative ways. Being able to capture these moments makes people accountable for their actions that they didn't necessarily think they were being monitored doing. It's important to teach children in today's tech world to be safe and make good choices online and offline because you never know what people might decide to put on Youtube or Facebook.