ERAC is sponsoring the Learning Links sessions for teachers. The sessions are being presented by North Vancouver teachers that have created a series of 3 books.
Today's session is about Digital Expression. A starting point was sending students as film crews to interview professionals - comic book writer, CBC New Media, Gaming, Musician, and Designer / Publishers. Some of the videos are on their site at www.learntech44.ca.
The Essential Skills include - Photography, Graphics, Movie Making, Storytelling and Music/Sound.
Using Digital Photos as story starters. Students take photos and then share them as story starters. Instead of a teacher giving a lead in like, "It was a dark and stormy night..." Now a photo of a man walking down a dusty road can be shown on the projector.
The Design Essentials include - Elements of: Line; Shape; Texture; Colour and Value; and Type as well as Principles of: Spaces; Balance; Emphasis and Flow; Repetition and Rhythm; and Unity.
An exciting chapter bringing 21st century reality of Creative Collaboration
Activity - Fun activity showcasing both Word and Appleworks ability to draw.
Stop motion is a way of looking at animating the story. iStopMotion or FrameThief are two tools that are possible. There are many curriculum correlations for using stop motion to tell digital stories.
Comic Life by Plasq. I love this software. A good recommendation is to plan 1 block to just explore. Then use the next lesson for applications. The options for integration are endless - pre-writing, newsletters, book reports, field trip review, storyboarding etc
Podcasting. A great idea that was shared is how we often look to the written word to assess students. This always puts students with written output difficulties at a disadvantage. Podcasting allows students to show their understanding without being disadvantaged by their written output - instead of assessing their writing, we can access their ideas.
Using Garageband(Mac) or Audacity (PC) you can have students create podcasts within 15 minutes for a 1 to 2 minute podcast. (Remember we are looking at their understanding, not their perfection of using technology)
The morning was a great opportunity to explore hands on.
Now off to lunch and then back for Web2.0 in the afternoon.
Kevin
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