Amy Kissel’s 6th English students are starting a MemoryCorps project influenced by @StoryCorps.

Amy Kissel will soon start reading The Giver with her 6th grade English students. In the meantime, she asked the kids to interview someone over their Thanksgiving vacation and record these stories via video, audio, or text. The idea of collecting and archiving stories is so profound, and even at her own Thanksgiving table, Amy asked her dad to share stories with the family. He replied, “Amy, I have so many. I’ve been around so long. Give me a specific question.” He also said to her, “When you’re finally old enough to ask these questions, the older generation is usually gone.”

Today, Amy asked her students, “What is memory?” After a discussion, we all watched a short video, Fifty People, One Question. Information about the filmmaker is listed on the YouTube link:

Produced and Directed by Galvea Kelly from Ireland – http://www.brandnua.com
http://www.facebook.com/brandnua
http://www.twitter.com/brandnua

Then we visited the StoryCorps website to see how they structure the collection of stories shared on the site. Each story includes a quote, a photo, a blurb, and a link. Amy then introduced the idea of building our own MemoryCorps, so she created a shared GoogleDoc with a table comprised of 3 columns and 18 rows. (One column per class and one cell per student – all students have editing rights). Like the stories featured on StoryCorps, the students too will include a quote, a photo, a blurb, and a link from the stories they gathered at Thanksgiving. If the student is unable to locate a photo, they can use an avatar/image that represents the story or the person. They will link to a transcript of the conversation in a separate GoogleDoc and also link to the audio or video file created with GarageBand and uploaded to our internal video server called TheTube (powered by Drupal).

(*** This is a modification of a project that Marisa Guastaferro, Monica Amaro and I designed last year. I wrote about it here.)

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.

Notes from “Collaborating with New Media” at Teach21

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

http://twitter.com/teach21c

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

Today, I led a half-day (2.5 hours) with attendees showing ways we use a variety of New Media tools here at The School to collaborate and innovate. There is just too much to share, and now I belatedly wish I’d shown less stuff. Better to explain in depth a few key projects to examine their innovation, interest, usefullness, assessment, and/or literacy. Even better to have a conversation with participants. Now I know. It’s less effective to see products without the process, duh. Plus, there was little interaction and I talked to much and jumped around too much between websites to the point that it made sense only to me. The last time I received negative feedback was at ISTE 2010. I need to now get over it, move on, and make my next presentation better.

Here is my Google Site where I tried to gather info: https://sites.google.com/a/theschool.columbia.edu/teach21-resources/workshop-…

(Other resources from the day are shared here: https://sites.google.com/a/theschool.columbia.edu/teach21-resources/)

And here are my unfortunately incomplete notes from the session:

What I say to kids all day every day: Use our available tools academically/respectfully/responsibly and Everything you do online is public/permanent/traceable.

The School’s new media server: http://newmedia.theschool.columbia.edu

I collect and archive finished student projects here: http://theschool.columbia.edu/middle-division/student_work

“security by obscurity”

New Media server:

Wiki – powered by MediaWiki – sort of a dormant technology to us right now

The Tube – our YouTube – tagging, tag cloud, embed code, default versus user login, download 

The Gallery – our Flickr – tagging, shared albums, others can upload, default versus user login, download original 

The Social Network – our Facebook – other social networking tools: Elgg, Edmodo, Schoology, Ning, Facebook

A social network answers these 3 questions: Who you are, who you know, what you do?

Show: Independent Reading Site, 6th Digital Art Portfolios, 8th To Kill a Mockingbird project, 8th science current events, 7th great mathematicians profiles, 7th American revolutionaries, 4th grade colonial characters 

Google Apps
(An old presentation I put together on Collaborating with Google Apps: https://docs.google.com/a/theschool.columbia.edu/present/edit?id=dcpjh599_198…)

Show: Independent Reading Site, 7th online science journals, 5th Grade Science Quiz

Live Form: http://spreadsheets.google.com/a/theschool.columbia.edu/viewform?hl=en&fo…

Spreadsheet: http://spreadsheets.google.com/a/theschool.columbia.edu/ccc?key=0AvbfIbg3rb3-…

Also show archived class projects, class websites, The Source (administrative Google Site), shared calendars, “collection” of Google Docs, labels for sorting Gmail

Cite your work and your images (Obama Hope poster discussion and the Mona Lisa)

Use advanced image searching to look for images that are licensed for sharing.

“Romeo and Juliet” Garageband podcasts in 6th Grade English

See the full gallery on Posterous

Marisa Guastaferro‘s 6th grade English students are working together in small groups to rewrite a scene from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”. The goal is for them to show understanding of the prose and dialogue by translating it into their own words. (The kids also watch West Side Story and compare/contrast the two stories.)

After, students will take pictures of themselves acting out key moments of the scene (like tableau vivant) and record their voices reading their script into a shared GarageBand file. We have them use a Logitech USB microphone and lay it on the table with the microphone upright between them to capture all of their voices equally.

The audio and images will be mashed together in GarageBand. Then, this file will be converted to an .mov file using Quicktime and uploaded to our Drupal video server that we’ve named The Tube (as it is similar to YouTube and we think it’s hilarious to preface anything related to The School with “The”).

Uploading video to The Tube generates embed code, so students can embed their finished podcast onto a shared class Google Site with the rest of their classmates’ projects.

In previous years, students painted enormous backdrops for their scene in Art and composed renaissance-era ambient background tunes in Music.