Techszewski

Scaffolding Digital Storytelling

In an effort to finally integrate some ideas I started developing for my thesis on effective digital storytelling, I'm creating and posting short activities that will help students acquire the essential skills that are part of writing and producing an effective digital story. We've been studying the Declaration of Independence. I thought that by providing the script, usually the hardest part of creating a digital story, and then asking students to find/create images that match it they'd find success in their first digital story experience. Later, I'll reverse the process and only provide images and ask them to develop the script. I'll probably use George Washington or Ben Franklin, maybe Alexander Hamilton.

I haven't dabbled much in the curriculum content-focused side of DS. This will provide some valuable data on how reliable DS is at challenging students to apply what they've learned about a topic. Too often, students are assigned a topic and multimedia production project then are expected to "uncover" the curricular objectives during the project. This isn't explicitly stated for them, but it's often what teachers have in mind.

Activity #1

Words.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In the short history of the United States, these are considered some of the most important words ever penned to paper.

Fifty years after he helped write the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson continued to champion these revolutionary ideas.

In his last letter, written ten days before both he and John Adams died, Jefferson wrote to a friend that he hoped the Declaration would serve as a "signal of the blessings of self-government to an ever evolving world."

I wonder if he would be surprised by how his young nation grew up to help spread democracy to so many parts of the world. 

Of the contagious chant of "Revolution" that toppled so many governments.

Would he be proud of our forced efforts to bring self-government to the Middle East?

Could he have imagined a world where the pursuit of happiness held such diverse meanings to so many people?

Where freedom of religion pitted nation...

...and neighbor against one another?

Liberty and the pursuit of happiness have always been at the expense of others.

Nearly 3000 American troops and 60,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the effort to bring "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" to the land where civilization began.

The contradictions tied to these famous words are as ripe today as they were when Jefferson proclaimed equality for all while prospering from and protecting the institution of slavery.

It would take another two centuries before equality for all in the United States was written into the Constitution. President Johnson conceded that we could no longer maintain the hypocrisy of celebrating the famous phrases of the Founding Fathers while denying their benefits to so many and finally gave teeth to the Civil Rights Act.

I try to remind myself that this country is still very young; that this experiment in democracy is still being tested; that a nation founded on a few radical words can alter the course of history.

Thomas Jefferson did not proclaim to have all the answers to the challenges of sustaining an effective democracy. He set the compass of the country pointing in a direction that empowered the individual states to dictate future courses of action. 

In the recent state elections, the people exercised their power and swung control of the Congress back to the Democrats. Regardless of your political views, this is a good thing. Democracy still works.

The next presidential election marks an historic opportunity. With Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama running for president, our country has evolved to the moment when we will test those deeply charged words of "we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

Will it be finally be self-evident?

That a successful democracy depends on the true and accurate representation of

ALL its citizens.

My Second Tour in Nam

No disrespect to those men and women who actually found themselves fighting in Southeast Asia over thirty years ago, but teaching middle school has got a lot in common with surviving a war in a foreign land. I know a little about preparing for war. I served eight years in the Army National Guard. They paid for my undergrad tuition and taught me lots of useful things to assist me if I ever found myself on the battlefield. It's been nearly a decade since I wore the uniform, marched in formation, fired a rifle, and followed the orders of a commanding officer. When I left the Army, my teaching career was just beginning. I traded the soldier's duty to "serve and defend" for a duty just as important and vastly more complex than knowing how to follow orders and shoot the enemy before he shoots you.

From my couch, I've watched the US occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, seen the increasing numbers of National Guard members fill the need for troops on the ground and decreasing recruitment numbers signal waining support for the war.  My unit was never called to duty. I missed my chance to fulfill my Hemingway romance with war. It's a good thing. I'm not sure how I would have held up under actual battle conditions. From my training, I remember the term mettle:1 a : vigor and strength of spirit or temperament b : staying quality.

Middle schools seem to be designed to test the endurance of a teacher. I've taught for nearly 15 years, mostly 4th and 5th Grade, but I've spent enough time with kids of all ages to say that middle school is the most challenging. Years ago someone told me that middle school years were the "containment years." I had no idea what she meant at the time, but it's crystal clear now. Seventh and Eighth Grade can be a volatile time for kids. It was for me. Yet somehow I became a committed, independent reader and writer around that time, no thanks to my classes. However, I was contained long enough for some reaction to take hold. What it was I have no idea. A similar situation occurred a few weeks ago.

I had been on a student's case for weeks to turn in an assignment. Each time I asked him when he planned to turn it in he sighed and complained that he was overwhelmed and confused by what he needed to do. He skipped all after-school extra help sessions that I provided to help him. After the holiday vacation, I started back to school in a miserable mood. I wanted to go back to sleeping late and reading and writing for most of each day. Larry still had not turned in two major assignments. I was at my desk reviewing who had not turned in assignments and was about to call Larry up to firmly remind him once again of the work he had not turned in. But before I could call him, he came up to me and asked me how my vacation was. I was completely caught off guard.  I told him it was good. He continued to ask in the most genuine manner if I had spent time with my family and friends. He nodded and smiled as I told him how much I enjoyed seeing my two year old niece over Christmas. He returned to his seat and left me wondering who had just body snatched Larry. This was a remarkable shift in this student and I have no idea was prompted it. Today after class, I had to tell him that he'd receive a warning this quarter because he didn't turn in those two assignments. He shrugged his shoulders and said "Yeah, that's okay." A month earlier he would have pitched a fit and stormed out of the room in tears.

 

So I guess a teacher has to rely on hope to see yourself through the school year. Hope that students feel compelled to do their assignments. Hope that they make strides in seeing themselves as part of a larger learning community. Hope that they don't become completely consumed by the dating dance and their appearance. Hope that they retain the resilience of their younger years. Hope that they don't feel completely alone in the sea of students surrounding them each day.

What If...

• students became so enamored with blogs that they wanted to prove to their teachers that they actually could write coherently and follow basic grammar and punctuation rules?

Vacation Surfing

Over the last few weeks, I've been getting emails from a bunch of people interested in digital storytelling. There still isn't one place on the web where students, teachers or anyone interested in creating digital stories can meet to share ideas, works-in-progress, get advice on guiding students through a DS project. I have a prototype for an idea. It's a redesign of the StoryLink site, which was abandoned after funding fizzled for the project. I'll post that later. In the meantime, it seems there's been some great progress in the area of helping people combine images and text to create a digital story. These tools would have been helpful last year when I was writing my thesis. They all focus on the technology aspect of creating a digital story and not so much the actual story process. That's still the main problem in the edu-tech digital storytelling field. There's very few people discussing how can we help students/people tell better stories. Instead, it's how can make tools to make it easier for people  to combine images, text, and/or video with their voice.

Although these tools help with the production part of creating a digital story, they are making it easier for teachers using DS with students to spend more time helping students craft their stories instead of helping them become more adept iMovie users.

EyeSpot
BubbleShare

Video Games in the Classroom

“Will computers change the way we learn? We answer “yes”. Video games create new social and cultural worlds, worlds that help people learn by integrating thinking, social interaction, and technology, all in the service of doing things they care about … virtual worlds are powerful contexts for learning. “ — Schaffer, Squire, Halverson, Gee (2004)

A few years ago, I wrote Digital Storytelling Finds Its Place in the Classroom. In addition to an update to that article, I'd like to soon write an article along the lines of Video Games Find Their Place in the Classroom. While my digital storytelling work in my classroom this year has been less than what I hoped for, a recent exploration of Sid Meier's popular Civilization III computer game has reinforced some long held beliefs about the educational merit of games, both computer and traditional board games. I was expected to cover ancient civilizations in my curriculum and wanted to take advantage of Kurt Squire's research and development of a curriculum using Civ III.

I can't say what I've done so far has been carefully planned, but sometimes you find resources to enhance your teaching and they don't have to follow carefully constructed lesson plans. Even though Squire's work details specific lessons to follow, it's still possible for students to benefit from Civ III by playing a few times or even observing a small group playing. This has been the scenario that's played out in my classroom over the last month. Even though I could have secured multiple copies of the game for the five computers in my classroom at a whopping cost of $5 per game (buy it here), school policy prevented me from installing it. So, I found a Mac version and we've been using it on the G4 station, also in the classroom, that's free of installation restrictions. The dual flat planel monitors have made a big difference, facilitating small group use of the game and comments such as, "Mr. Banaszewski. I have a theory that if you send a warrior out to explore that it will lead to you getting more resources from a neighboring civilization. It's just a theory. I haven't tested it out yet." This comment came from a student who has aggresively resisted all verbal and print instruction during the quarter.

What I like about Civ III is how it enables a level of critical thinking that isn't so easy to attain during regular class discussions. In Civ III, students see the complex cause and effect relationships of how civilizations expand because of how they're manipulating the objects in the environment, sort of like how some students finally understand the concept of base ten in mathematics when they use cuisenaire rods and cubes that they can manipulate to model 1, 10, 100, and 1000.

 

A Man of My Word

Download TB_thesis_2006_edits.doc - Feel free to read and send me comments

Download TBanaszewski_DS_thesis.pdf - This is easier to read

Last year, I interviewed a bunch of people from around the country about their digital storytelling work with students. I told them I would share my thesis with them, as well as all of the resources I collected during my research. I delayed posting my thesis because I wasn't satisfied with the draft I had to turn into Georgia Tech. The last three chapters really show that I bit off more than I could chew. They're pretty thin. But, no more making excuses. I have to put this thing out there.

I'm always thinking of how to improve my approach to digital storytelling in the classroom. I covered a lot of ground in my thesis, areas that haven't been addressed by many people in the field. I represent the teacher's perspective foremost. I cringe at glitzy multimedia presentations that students have spent expensive classroom time preparing, only to demonstrate that they know how to cut and paste pictures from the Internet. Like good writing, it's got to move me, say something original, make a point. In a nutshell, my thesis says that if you believe technology in schools should be used to do the latter then teach kids how to tell good stories, deconstruct visual elements of good stories(movies, songs, TV, posters, photographs), and begin media literacy lessons in kindergarten. Teach kids that technology is a tool to help them communicate what they've learned. It's also a valuable tool to learn with.

Act I

The grand plan upon returning to teaching was to apply what I learned about digital storytelling from my research of the last two years. December 19th and I'm just now finding the time to post something related to being back in the classroom. Unfortunately, I've had to shelve most of my edu-tech ideas and concentrate on learning how to be an effective middle school Humanities teacher. I still have plans to introduce digital storytelling at my school and I WILL PRODUCE A COLLECTION OF DIGITAL STORIES  WITH MY STUDENTS and INTEGRATE MEDIA LITERACY INTO MY LESSONS - this year. The real purpose of this post is to put those plans in writing and guilt myself into following through on them.

In many ways, it's been like being a first year teacher. Each day has been a mini-marathon with an endless series of peaks and lows. It's too bad I haven't made more time for blogging about the last few months. It would have been particularly helpful for anyone considering a change of teaching positions. I've always said I wanted to experience teaching all of the levels. I've got elementary down and am a third of the way through my first tour of middle school. Teaching adolescents is a unique experience. I had always heard of middle school as the "containment years." I think that's a narrow view of the potential of teenagers. I don't think much of my teaching so far this year has been a showcase of redirecting all of that adolescent energy, but there's still two more acts to this play.

One of the few edu-tech successes of the year has been blogging. The goal was to have students post each week about the books they were reading and also comment on each other's posts. They love the commenting part, but only a handful have made meaningful posts. I have to do something like highlight those that make quality posts or make some public recognition to reinforce the type of blogging we want to see. The commenting has attracted the readers and non-readers alike, but mostly it's become an extension of IMing. The cool thing is that they don't know I'm the admin, so I can make comments and they think it's the school's tech coordinator. There's a bunch of different things I'd like to do with the blog like hold moderated discussions, theme responses to topics such as books made into movies (eg. Wrinkle in Time, The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe), and experiment with ways to motivate the non-readers (eg. an online graph that charts a class' progress on number of books read per month).

There just isn't the time to do this alone. Most of my time is spent figuring out, prepping and revising my lesson plans. I think it's like what a former teacher told me about being late for class: if you really want to be on time, you will. If I really want to do these things I'll figure out a way.

Learning to Dance Again

Tomorrow morning, twenty-three 7th and 8th graders will waltz, stumble and creep into my classroom. It's been two years since I did this. Stand in front of a group of kids and begin a 180 day journey. I love this time of year. My favorite metaphor to capture it is a boat pushing away from the shore, oars in the water, destination unknown. Well, not exactly. It won't be a carefree, unstructured meandering through the joys of literature and community building. I know that I am required to put into port for MCAS testing and establish routines that provide comfort and safety to enable all students to succeed. There will be few moments like this one to reflect on the journey. I wanted to mark this moment as I head into my 11th year of teaching.

WANTED: Digital Storytelling Teacher

AnyName School, a progressive urban small high school, seeks a dedicated highly qualified teacher with extensive educational technology experience and vision to manage our Media Arts program. The position entails supporting classroom teachers and running a 20 station Mac/PC computer lab which students have access to before, during and after school. The goal of the Media Arts program is for students to acquire the skills to effectively communicate in a variety of media. A heavy emphasis is placed on media literacy as well as enhancing students' overall reading, writing and oral expression skills. An after-school Digital Storytelling Club is also run out of the Media Arts Lab and would require your assistance. Please send a letter of interest, resume, and links of any relevant work to AnyNameSchool_HR@gmail.com.

I've had to eat a big slice of humble pie these past few weeks. Not that I thought it was going to be easy to land a job remotely resembling my above dream ad, but when you want to teach in the Boston Public Schools and you have NO experience in the BPS system, it doesn't matter how many degrees you have (I have THREE) or your years of teaching experience (I have TWELVE). I'm tempted to post something on craigslist or in the Boston Globe that reads: HIRE ME: Certified 1-6 Teacher, 12 yrs. exp. ME and MS degrees, published author, extensive educational technology experience, damn good teacher who wants to teach in Boston.

I interviewed last week in the school district where I previously taught for ten years. They didn't ask one question about technology. I won't be disappointed if they don't call me.

When I'm not writing cover letters, I'm out on my bike training for the Pan Mass Challenge. This will be my fifth year riding in the two day 200 mile benefit ride for The Jimmy Fund and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. I finally finished my fundraising letter. This is the hardest thing I write all year. Read it here or Download pmc_2005.pdf Now, I'm going to put here it in the blog so I have to follow thru on it. I've been storyboarding a short movie about the PMC for a while. Each time I go out for a training ride it gets clearer. So, check back soon for what should be a great digital story that, if you haven't sponsored me already, will definitely get you to bust out the checkbook or plastic.

Unemployment Daze

Two years ago, this blog began as a way to reflect on what it was like to leave teaching after ten years and go back to school to pursue some research into educational technology. The blog turned into a great way to keep track of my research. It started out mostly as a place to complain about the grad program I moved 1200 miles to take part in, but in the end it was a very useful concrete reminder of what I had accomplished in such a short time.

So, it's all over. An M.S. in Information Design and Technology. I can you tell what makes one website better than another, how television and the Internet will most likely converge in the next few years, where video gaming is headed in the near future and if you're not oohing and ahhing yet I can babble on about New Media theory and the social implications of the Internet for a few hours.

More importantly, if you want to know anything about digital storytelling I'm your guy. I left the classroom to figure how technology can be used to help people, students in particular, create, shape and share short first person stories. I think my thesis covers a lot. In a nutshell, if you want to students to tell effective digital stories, and to a larger extent use technology effectively, you must focus on three things: story literacy, visual literacy and media literacy. Currently, schools focus on teaching software - tool literacy - and overlook the essential underlying skills students must possess if they are to use technology to communicate effectively.

Graduation was over a month ago. I moved back to Boston, started looking for a teaching position at one of the Boston high schools that have reformatted under the Small High School initiative. No luck yet landing a position, but it's early. I have no regrets about my decision to leave the classroom. My time at Georgia Tech will lead to things I haven't even thought of yet.

However, as my email inbox awaits a response to my many queries around the city looking for a veteran classroom teacher with extensive experience in using technology to strengthen students' literacy skills I start to think of all the possible jobs/cool things I could now pursue if a teaching job does not work out for this fall.

1. Hike the Appalachian Trail - good way to spend six months and see the North and Southeast
2. Work in an Alaskan cannery - always wanted to experience that after reading a friend's story
3. Video editor for a reality show
4. Help produce country music videos
5. Office job - see how I handle a cubicle
6. Any job downtown where I get to rub elbows with all the suits
7. Vendor at Fenway Park
8. Children's book editor
9. Web designer for storytellers and other creative folks