Digital Storytelling

Darren Kuropatwa { @dkuropatwa } and Andy McKiel {@amckiel } Technology Coordinators for my home division, St. James-Assiniboia, shared 6 easy pieces for digital storytelling at BU last week.

6 Easy Pieces v1 from Darren Kuropatwa

The great part of the PD was the hands on nature. We got to try everything presented, which makes using these resources in our classroom much easier. We learn by doing, so how can we teach without having done it?

1 - What did you contribute to the learning of others?
This is a great question to consider. I realize that once I am a teacher it will be my job to contribute to the learning of others, but I want to extend this everywhere and apply it now. I am making a conscious effort to help fellow students in any way I can and I intend to continue this with my colleagues, both locally and digitally.
Our activity for this piece was to pick three prompts from this google doc j.mp/bloggingprompt, pick a partner and select one question, and then record our conversation about it. We did this through the iTalk Recorder app for apple devices. We limited ourselves to 90 seconds and then emailed it directly play2learn.posterous.com. In less than five minutes we had posted a simple podcast!

REMEMBER: None of us are as smart as all of us!

Here's our conversation. I don't do a lot of sound stuff on this blog, but I want to do more. It's a great differentiation tool. I am very dissatisfied with the quality of my laptop microphone, so I guess I'm in the market for an upgrade.
My favourite story from this section was about using podcasting in a French classroom. Students were told they had a short time to think of a memory or feeling connected to thunderstorms and then they'd have to record themselves talking about it for a podcast. Having an authentic audience outside peers, family and their teacher motivated the students: they asked for extra time to look up vocabulary, to write out what they wanted to say, and even to practice it to make sure they were pronouncing everything correctly. The students were coming up with these requests themselves! So often we simply assign students to do these things, when they could be asking us to do them.


2 - What do you see in your world today?

Drop boxers, this is worth checking out!

We split up into the same groups and were given five minutes to capture 5 seconds of beauty on video. I enjoyed this a lot. I took a video of a public cup collecting pop tabs to help a young boy get a wheel chair. When we were done we used dropitto.me to send our videos to Darren's drop box.
 He then imported them into iMovie and quickly made a video of all our beauty clips. I do a lot of movie editing, but I'd never seen iMovie before not having a Mac. It looks pretty good.
When it came to music, we were given a great resource for finding creative commons music - jamendo.com. I love not having to worry about copyright violations and will definitely add jamendo to my list when I'm looking for music to use in videos and presentations.
This is the beauty we found:

Again I've been inspired and am collecting moments of beauty to make a video response.

3 - Who are you?
How do we explain ourselves, share ourselves? A life can be written down in volumes of volumes (Winston Churchill's biography anyone?), but our task was share ourselves in 4 slides attached to a minute of narration.
I chose to share how I decided to become a teacher. I drew my slides, but we were shown various ways to find creative commons licensed images for our slides, including search.creativecommons.org and www.flickr.com/creativecommons/. Appropriate crediting was also covered. Two ways that make attribution easy are the flickr cc attribution helper and open attribute.
I drew the pictures myself and put them into Powerpoint. I then exported the file as a pdf. To record the audio I used vocaroo.com. It was very easy. We then logged onto slideshare and uploaded our pdf and added our audio to it. We listened along in the editor and set the slide lengths to match our narration and, boom, an audio/visual story about me!

How i learned i wanted to teach from digitallearning

This will be a great way to learn about my students. It takes some of the nerves out of having to speak in front of their peers, but I still get to hear students talk about themselves.

We sort of ran out of time at this point, but these are the remaining pieces

4 - What did you learn today?
Students pair a picture and audio on the class blog to share what they are learning. Examples were students reading from picture books with a picture of them reading it.

5 - Scribe blogs - Blogs are used by students summarize their learning and write their own textbook!

6 - The learning culture is participatory
The internet is no longer just a giant bowl of jelly beans where we pick out our favourite flavours, but a jelly bean factory where we work together to make amazing flavours for everyone!

I loved this session. It flew by. I wish it could have been twice as long. Thanks, Andy and Darren!

PLN 2.0

This last Thursday our Internet for Educators class was visited by John Evans. John is a technology consultant for Manitoba Education. He shared many useful websites, talked about the importance of a personal learning network (PLN), and gave us a quick tutorial on Maple, an upcoming sharing site for Manitoba educators.

John has been compiling sites for a long time. He mentioned wikis, diigo, pearltrees, scoop it and paper.li to name a few. I use diigo myself and love it. I can group and tag my links, share them, highlight parts of websites, and they go wherever I go! John shared his diigo group, Literacy with ICT, and I followed it. There is tonnes of stuff there and I get new additions emailed to me.
Another of the curation sites looked at was scoop.it.

It is aesthetically pleasing and I like how each site, or scoop, is a tile with title, thumbnail and text from the site. I just made a diigo bookmark of John's Professional Learning for Busy Educators. I'm used to diigo, but if scoop.it has a chrome extension that lets me scoop within my browser the impressive display might just be enough to get me to switch.

The meat of John's presentation was PLNs: what they've been, what they are now and why they are important. John stressed that we need to shift from talking about professional development to professional learning, because development is incremental and finite (eventually you are fully developed), but learning is continuous and infinite. This idea really struck me and I plan to remember it throughout my career, especially if know-it-all thoughts start creeping into my mind.
Teachers have been islands in the past. Working alone with only their training and whatever books they could acquire to look to. In multi-class schools colleagues became an added resource to improve teaching practice. Now a typical teacher's learning network looks something like this:

The internet, especially web 2.0 with its focus on collaboration, has dramatically expanded the professional learning opportunities available to teachers. There are so many options available and they are two-way (sometimes n-way), 24/7, at my pace, based on my interests, in real-time or asynchronous.

Conferences and seminars used to only be available locally, but skype, twitter, live streaming and the like have removed the distance barriers and allows world-wide learning. I started on twitter last year for my ICT course and have found in to be a highly valuable resource for learning from and connecting with people. I blog, use diigo, share with dropbox and google drive. However, there is no set things you need to be doing, or sites you have to join, to have a PLN. John stressed that a PLN is not so much a thing, but a state of mind. A PLN starts, and continues to grow, with a commitment to learning and sharing.

With so much available to us it can be overwhelming thinking of where to start, but John gave us a leg up in that too. He signed up our whole class for the beta version of Maple. It's going to be a hub for sharing resources and ideas, and building relationships with fellow teachers in Manitoba. We each have a library of resources we share and can join groups, make events and follow others. It looks like a great addition to my growing PLN.

Writing From Memory

I attended a PD last week about a daily writing exercise that focuses on writing from memory. It only takes 15 minutes and then can form the basis of future writing. Students are given a trigger word, say shoes. You give them about three minutes to jot down as many memories they associate with shoes as they can. Then you ask them to pick the memory that stands out most in their mind. They single out that memory. You ask the students just to think about the memory, while you ask leading questions. For shoes it could be, "Are they new or old?", "Are they your shoes?", "Are you wearing them?", "What colour are they?". This gets them to examine the memory in more detail. Take about two minutes to do this. Then say, "Go!" or "Write!" or some equivalent and the students are to write for ten straight minutes. Their memory needs to be in the present tense and start with, "I am...".
Students are told not to erase anything, just keep going. Also, that if they hit an impasse or a block to doodle on the side. Keeping the pen moving keeps your brain moving and taking the pen off the paper can easily take your mental train off its rails. Also, spelling doesn't matter. Just write down your experience. At the end of the ten minutes have students finish the sentence they are writing and put down their pencils.
These drafts are saved for a week or two, to allow for the writers to become detached, and then reviewed. The students pick a piece from that week that they like and then work on revising and polishing it into a final piece.
The rationale is:

• This gets students into the habit of writing, because it is hard work.
• They are generating a lot of text, which increases fluency.
• They are learning how to develop detail in writing.
• The motivation to write is authentic as the topic is something important to each individual.
• It instils confidence.

An inspiration for this method was Lynda Berry's book What It Is. It is a graphic novel that outlines writing from memory, and is itself an example of it. There are two questions we frequently ask ourselves when writing:

1. Is this good?
2. Does this suck?

Both undermine our writing and Lynda suggests every time students (or ourselves as writers) we ask ourselves one of those questions we answer ourselves with

A first draft is never meant to be perfect or better than someone else's writing. It is solely to get our ideas out of our head and onto the page. I think it is a great way to practice writing and to get people who would classify themselves as non-writers interested in writing.

If you want to read more about it, or just want to check out an awesome graphic novel, click the book below and buy it!

picture from
http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/shopCatalogLong.php?st=art&art=a45a8141b837f5

Here's what I wrote (unedited) in the 8 minutes provided. The theme was shoes.

My Fab5

Fab5 is a conference for teachers in their first five years of teacher, as well as pre-service teachers, like myself. It is put on by the Manitoba Teachers Society in both Winnipeg and Brandon. The conference spans three days.

Kirsten, Jennifer and I with Mitch.

THURSDAY NIGHT
After registration there was a light supper provided and some mingling. I talked with some friends I knew were coming and got to know some Ed students I hadn't had the privilege of meeting before.
The highlight of the night was keynote speaker, Mitch Dorge. He is the drummer for the Crash Test Dummies and loves to share the lessons he's learned with others. His energy, enthusiasm and silliness are contagious. The clapping, shouting, knee-slapping, feather-beating, rubber-chicken-abusing, and ninja-screaming band he turned all of us into is ample evidence of that.
Through his activities, stories and an amazing drum demonstration Mitch urged us:

• To know the unique energy  we have and bring 100% of it to everything we do.
• To realize that everything we say and do affects people - the intended and the unknown.
• That we have something to learn from everyone, regardless of how MUCH they know.

It was a great way to get started and a message worth remembering.
Afterward, there was a mingling time and I got to speak with some MTS Staff Officers and meet Mitch himself. He posed for some pictures and took time to get to know everyone who spoke with him.

FRIDAY MORNING
I had two sessions Continue the Adventure of Laughter with Mark Essay and Resiliency with Audrey Siemens.
It's obvious why Mark does a session on laughter: he is hilarious! He used stories, actions, wacky voices and was incredibly engaging. He shared that laughter is relaxing and world-wide, comes from interaction, and is contagious. He gave a lot of practical tidbits and strategies, but two things especially stood out for me.

1. If I want enthusiasm and engagement in my class it is MY responsibility to maintain and sustain it.
2. That if we are subjected to limitations we learn not to exceed them and will continue that way even when the limitations are removed (or weren't real in the first place). We need to provide a classroom where the lid is off and show kids that it is safe to jump as high as they want.

In the second morning session Audrey shared wisdom from teachers she works with and her own on how to stay resilient as new teachers. We came up with a group definition of what resiliency means. I thought the metaphor of individuals as jugglers was very apt. We juggle a series of balls: work, family, health, friends and integrity. All are made of glass, which may shatter if not kept aloft, except for work. Work is a rubber ball. We also received a stress apple in this session and it is a great, tactile reminder of the juggler metaphor.

FRIDAY AFTERNOON
My two afternoon sessions were Classroom Management with Blake Stephens and Teaching Aboriginal Topics with Wade Houle.
Blake has spent many years working with children with behavioural difficulties and shared his experience with us. He stressed building relationships, rationally detaching and active listening. I appreciated his story about helping students avoid trouble instead of getting them into trouble. He used some very memorable metaphors, like carrying around a bucket of sand and equality is banning glasses. He stressed the importance of using positive language: "You can go outside when..." v. "You can't go outside until...", and that I can't stop doing what I enjoy just because I'm busy. Blake's insights are going make my future classroom a better place.
Wade used his session to share, share, share. He gave us over 30 lesson plans and activities, with exemplars and explanations. To have things that have been successfully used in class is invaluable. One particular activity, the tic-tac-toe, stands out for me. It had nine assignments in a grid. The students had to choose 3 of them to do and they must all be in a winning tic-tac-toe line. It's a fun way to provide choice, but Wade used it even more effectively. Each row was an assignment geared to a different learning style. Visual learners could go along the top row. Students without a strong preference could choose a column and do three different types of assignment. So, now the instrument of choice becomes an instrument of differentiation as well. I love it!

SATURDAY MORNING
The final day's sessions focused on showcasing MTS Special Area Groups of Educators: specialized associations within MTS that provide resources and development for members. I chose to go to A Window to the World: Blogging in the Classroom with Leslie Dent Scarcello & Erin Malkoske of ManACE, and Creating an Environment of Mathematical Literacy by Tricia Licorish of MAMT.
Leslie and Erin shared how they started blogging personally and with their classrooms. Their rationale is that blogging:

• Increases engagement
• Gives an authentic, worldwide audience
• Makes connections
• Is a way to pay it forward
• Enables discussion about digital citizenship

They gave a quick tutorial on how to set up a blog on blogger and shared important considerations, like setting criteria for posts and comments, and adminstration and parental permission for posting online.
They showed a few of the blogs that inspired them and on one of them there was something amazing! An assignment to guess a fictional character by the apps on his/her fictional iPhone and then create an iPhone, apps and personalized case, for a character that has been studied during the year. It's engaging (I want to do it right now) and to be successful you really have to get inside the character's head and then make inferences.
Tricia's session was practical and hands on. She shared websites that she has found very helpful and activities for all streams. We were able to wander and try out the activities ourselves, to see how they work and to fix them in our memories. We each left with a CD full of Math resources and built an infinity card with rules for adding, subtracting, multiplying and diving integers. I'm so thankful for sessions like these. I feel like these activities and lessons shared with me are building a foundation for my career. The more I have to draw on for planning, the more I will be able to focus on effective teaching when I am in my first classroom.

FINAL THOUGHTS
For the PD sessions alone this conference is well worth the cost; however, it was much more than that. Two breakfasts, a lunch with dessert, light supper, snacks, drinks, wine and cheese are included. You get a free text book, time to network with colleagues, presenters and MTS staff. There are also extra prize draws. I almost won one, but the wrong Tyler was called.
I'm very glad I went and plan on attending for the next 5 years as well! Fab5 is fabulous!

Professional Development

I have tried to get a wide range of professional development in my first year of education studies. There was one session of particular note to this blog was during the Manitoba Association of Teachers of English SAGE Conference: Videogames and Literacy in the Post CoD World: How We Can Use Video Games in the Classroom, Change the World, and Avert the Apocalypse by Devin King.
There were a few sections in his presentation. First, he went through the popular depiction of video games as violent and brain-melting. He mentioned that adults are now the largest population of gamers and that it should be no surprise that video games have become more adult. The industry is targeting their largest market.
Second, he stated the positives of this story-telling form. He focused on how gamers embody characters while playing the game, that video games are open-ended, with gamers co-creating the stories by playing through them. He shared a personal example in which he chose the "Hard" gameplay option for the newly released Batman: Arkham City, because he would be playing as Batman, and Batman, as a normal human, is not able to take any short-cuts. He advocated making informed decisions as there are some great games, with great themes, gameplay and story that are not inappropriate. Similarly to how an English teacher needs to make informed decisions as to which novels to include in class. There are good and bad examples of both.

Box art courtesy izelda.net

Third, he went through how he has implemented The Legend of Zelda: the Windwaker as a text in his English classroom. His students would play with a partner to discuss and insight as they played.Students would cycle through a 15 minute playing period once a week, or until they reached a teacher-set check point. At the end of the week the class would discuss themes and challenges found in that game session.
Windwaker deals with heroism and exploration and discussions focused on how these themes played out in the game, how the players incorporated the themes into their gameplay and decisions as they had control of Link, and extending the themes from the video game into their own lives with questions like, "How can we, ourselves, be heroic in our daily lives?"
I was fascinated with the topic, especially since I LOVED this game! I hope to be able to do this in a future classroom of mine. I think many people see the new adult nature of gaming and write it off, but I think approaching emerging literary forms as we approach established ones enables us to extract great content from a medium that our students are already immersed in.

Image courtesy of IGN.com

Link, whom I embody while playing the game, sailing off towards discovery, adventure, heroism and EDUCATION!