Digital Struggles in a Virtual World

This week, I struggled with being able to motivate myself to use the internet. As I am sure everyone who assesses the internet this week is aware, it is not a fun place to hang out right now. No matter what side you chose during the election, we are all seeing hate spew from every seam of social media. Personally, upset and dismayed at the election results, I decided I would stay off social media until friends and family stop commenting. I began searching the internet for tools to use or my assignments, and still found that I could not escape the constant reminder of what our nation has become. Since I work in a virtual environment and attend school in a virtual environment, I found myself unable to escape the news stories and posts I wanted so desperately to ignore. Never experiencing anxiety caused by in internet, I was unsure how to handle this situation.

This got me thinking... If an adult such as myself is finding it difficult to stay positive with all of these constant reminders of our nation’s discontent, how are our teenage virtual students handling this? Students who attend virtual school are forced to use the internet daily. Students attending regular school can escape the negativity if they choose to. I am interested to study how times of great tragedy affect virtual students vs brick-and-mortar students. I believe this is where curriculum curation can be absolutely heroic. While we can’t change a student’s default homepage results, we can change which websites they are forced to visit while completing one of our assignments. I took note of which pages I used that contained links to pages with negative ads, news stories, or blog posts during the creation of my digital story. It was almost all of them. There were very few pages I had preselected that totally filtered out the possibility of seeing a news headline with a link to negative content. This made me aware of the importance of selecting resources with no changing ads or rotating links. I will need to spend more time searching for these resource and making changes to my curriculum page.

 As far as my educational concerns, one aspect of this activity I personally struggled with was deciding how to narrow down my digital story. The historical person I chose accomplished so many important things. It was difficult to choose what to include and what to leave out. This lead me to believe my students would also struggle with pulling out the appropriate amount of information. “But it’s all important if it happened to them in their lives!” I can already hear my students complaining…. I will need to provide them with guidelines to the specific type of life-event they should provide in their story. Since they are only in 5th grade, they are still struggling with the concept of main idea and relevant details. They are not coming into the assignment with a background in history, like I am, so they will not know which life events are relevant to their historical figure’s importance in history. I will need to figure out a way to solve this problem before they tackle the project. One possible way to solve this problem is to provide a link to a web resource that lists their person’s most important accomplishment and ask them to ‘work backwards.’ I will ask the students to list a few events and cross off the ones that do not have a direct correlation to their memorable accomplishment. With some explicit instruction and guided practice, I believe this is feasible. Another possible solution to this problem is to provide the students with a “student friendly” version of the rubric I will use to evaluate their assignments. After allowing them to read the wiki curriculum page and explaining the assignments, they will work with a partner to score each sample digital story. We will then discuss their ratings and why they think each one deserved a certain score. This will hopefully provide them with an idea of what I am looking for in their digital storytelling projects.

An Example of Digital Storytelling

Click here to view my Wiki page for this class project's curriculum page.

Dreaming about Digital Storytelling...

If I could get my 5^th grade students to master the art of digital storytelling, the possibilities for social studies projects would be endless. I taught a mixture of reading and social studies, and I loved how excited many of the kids were to learn history. 5^th grade is often the first time they are introduced to interesting historical concepts, ideas, and people. They have not been classically conditioned to automatically think about taking a nap as soon as the teacher asks them to open their social studies textbook. It is a mistake to think that history should be taught merely by reading from a book. Teachers should strive to make history come alive for students—after all, it is the real-life story of us!    

One idea a teacher could use to make history come alive is by having the class create virtual autobiographies for a historical figure the class is studying. For example, if a class was completing a unit on the American Revolution, each student can make an autobiography for all the major-players. If that person was alive today, telling you about their life, what would they say? What photos would they use to capture a particular element of their life? Students would use a tool such as Animoto or Voicethread to create presentations with audio content. Their voice becomes the ‘voice’ of their assigned figure. This project is similar to the ‘living museum’ project popular among elementary students, but it is incorporating technology students can use to portray their figure without limitations.  

Digital Storytelling

A demonstration of Sway as a digital storytelling tool

Sway Survey

Sway Survey

This week, I decided to take on the challenge of gathering feedback for my blog posts. I am fully aware that my Sway Tutorial is not perfect, but I feel like it served its purpose by demonstrating some of Sway's amazing features. The purpose of this survey is to gather data that I will use in a future project. Please complete the survey and let me know what you thought!

You can complete the survey here, or within my Sway presentation. The best thing about Sway is that the presentation is always 'live.' This means that even though I posted the link over a week ago, I was able to instantly add the survey on the last page without changing the link on my blog. I can think of a few times when I created a presentation and then thought of something else I wanted to add, but it was too late and the link was already sent.

My First Attempt with Microsoft Office Sway

This week, I decided to attempt to make a tutorial to show fellow educators how to use the Microsoft Office tool, Sway.

This proved to be more difficult than I thought it would be. Turns out, making tutorials is hard. I have a newfound respect for those who publish new tech tutorials frequently. It is an art within itself. I struggled with thinking of ways I could use the features within the tool to demonstrate creative uses for the classroom.

Here is my link to my Sway presentation. Even if my presentation does not blow you away, I do recommend watching the embedded videos. I enjoy this tool enough to attempt to spread the word.

Check Out my Sway by clicking on the link, or view the embedded version in this blog post!

9/30/16

9/30/16 Blog Post
9:09 pm