Our new and improved Independent Reading Site is up and running at @The_School thanks to @finlaycm.

Cristina Martinez-Finlay is the Network Manager (and ever so much more) at The School at Columbia University. Last year, she decided to embark on a personal journey to revamp our beloved but kinda ugly Independent Reading Site which had been a labor-of-love Google Site that Marisa Guastaferro Mendez and I launched in 2007. We even won an award for it back in the day.

Marisa wanted an internal space for kids to keep track of their independent reading, post book reviews, and social network about literacy. We examined GoodReads, Shelfari, and other sites before deciding to just have an internal Google Site that anyone in our school community could access and edit. The site was alive and kicking and heavily used for 6 years. Then last year, Cristina showed me her pet project. She used Drupal to build the site (because, lordy, that woman knows Drupal), and she built up a site that is internal, robust, and legitimately way more attractive to use. The kids love it.

Today, Eve Becker (8th grade English) and I reminded the kids how to navigate the site, add books, join groups, post reviews, and comment on other people’s reviews. Cristina was there to answer questions too, and I’m glad the kids had a chance to appreciate her to her face.

6th graders are uploading/sharing their finished StoryCorps-esque interviews today

For one of their final projects of the year, 6th graders created a short audio piece inspired by StoryCorps. Monica Amaro (6th Social Studies teacher) and Marisa Mendez (6th English teacher) paired up to lead this project which was a lovely culmination of the 6th grade’s year-long theme: How History Shapes My Identity.

StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives. Since 2003, StoryCorps has collected and archived more than 40,000 interviews from nearly 80,000 participants. Each conversation is recorded on a free CD to share, and is preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. StoryCorps is one of the largest oral history projects of its kind, and millions listen to our weekly broadcasts on NPR’s Morning Edition and on our Listen pages.

Students interviewed someone at home and used Garageband to extract a 2-3 minutes story. These audio pieces were exported as .m4a files and then converted to either .mp4 or .mov files that were then uploaded to TheTube (our internal video server powered by Drupal). Finally, students gathered links to their audio files, a description of their piece, a direct quote from the story, and an image. These were added to a table on a collaborative GoogleDoc to loosely model how StoryCorps organizes their files.

iMovie versus Garageband for podcasts

Marisa Guastaferro and I collaborate on a Romeo and Juliet podcast. In previous years, the students have used Garageband to put merge images, audio, and music. However, the finished product is a small video that is really ideal for viewing on an iPod and not a big screen. I used to use Quicktime to export their podcast into a bigger format, but it was still pixelated. This year, we decided to use iMovie to blend our projects. I found the above tutorial for creating a slideshow with soundtrack in iMovie.

“Social Networking and Literacy” at #Teach21c

http://teach21.theschool.columbia.edu/

http://twitter.com/teach21c

As I wrote in my last post, Teach21 was a professional development institute for 21st Century educators organized by faculty and administrators at The School at Columbia University. Every day there was a keynote speaker (Sree Sreenivasan, Howard Gardner, A.J. Jacobs, Karen Cator) and many half-day and full-day concurrent offerings.

Thursday, I offered a session about “Social Networking and Literacy.” We started the 2.5 hours together with a discussion about literacy. I used to think literacy was just the reading and writing of text. Nowadays literacy is about learning how to comprehend/research/navigate/communicate/cite/re-mix/share all sorts of media.

We started off the session with a conversation about the new literacies and looked at a couple of sources:

• Wikipedia page for “New Literacies”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_literacies
• NCTE Position Statement: http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/21stcentdefinition
• 21st Century Literacies: http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/
• Henry Jenkins’s “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century”: http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/files/working/NMLWhitePaper.pdf

Then I showed a couple of projects where students publish individual and group work online and collaborate via shared access, commenting, hyperlinking, and other interactions. We looked at The Independent Reading Site that I set up with Marisa Guastaferro three years ago and the To Kill a Mockingbird book groups set up by Eve Becker for her 8th grade English classes. Both projects are described in this post: http://karenblumberg.com/social-networking-and-literacy-on-2511-at-600

Then we looked at ways to set up similar projects with other available technologies.

• You don’t have an in-house Drupal photo server? Use Flickr, Shutterfly, Picasa and work with privacy and permissions.
• You don’t have an in-house Drupal video server? Use YouTube and consider public/private settings.
• You don’t have an in-house Elgg social network? Use Edmodo, Schoology, Facebook, Ning, Moodle, Twitter  to set up gathering spaces online.
• You don’t have Google Apps? Use Shelfari or Goodreads to discuss literature.

Resources from this and other Teach21 sessions are here: https://sites.google.com/a/theschool.columbia.edu/teach21-resources/