Is Digital Storytelling a meaningful tool and measure for learning?

I, like Carolyn, can't get the Prensky article out of my head. Digital natives, digital immigrants is such a simple tag to put on us, but so descriptive and so accurate. As a digital immigrant, I so much want to be a digital native, like my son and my students. But, alas, it will never be. I can take one step closer with Digital Storytelling.

I have to admit, I was a little skeptical about Digital Storytelling. It sounded like a nice way to tell a photo story, maybe rehash some pictures in a new, techy way. But I didn't see how it could be very educational, especially in math. The more I looked, the more I read, the more I believed in its ability to teach and for kids to learn, but in subjects where more expression and creativity is normally found, perhaps English or Social studies. How to apply this to math?

As I sat around this summer and planned out my curriculum for the upcoming year. One project that I considered was giving my pre calc students digital cameras and letting them explore the world and find examples of conic sections (parabolas, ellipses, circles, etc.) Conic sections are fun and I thought this might be a nice project to add to the chapter. Little did I know, that I was going to employ digital storytelling. I can now have the students take pictures, upload them and do the voice overs to explain their photos.

Another item that I include every year is a biography on a famous mathematician. How much more fun would it be to create a digital story?

Another way for math teachers to employ digital storytelling is in geometry. Architecture is full of shapes. Students could determine the scale between the picture and the actual building.

Digital storytelling is more difficult for math and science teachers, but still worth the effort.

Digital Natives - Visual Literacy

Our CTER experience is beginning to wind down, only 6 months and 1-½ classes left. Has anyone noticed that the discussions amongst ourselves are shorter? While each class has been full of useful and new information, I catch myself trying to get excited about each new project and topic that we begin. I know that’s a bad attitude and I would be angry with my own children and my students for acting like that, but it’s true. So while I really (repeat: really) liked the Web quest module, I saw an article about Digital Natives and wondered, “Didn’t we talk about this before?” WELL, apparently I wasn’t paying attention earlier. WOW, did that article by Prensky hit a chord with me. I found myself reading it over and over. I’ll bet I read it 4 times. I made copies (55 copies) of it and put it in the mailboxes of all my teachers at school. I explained it to my son on the way home from his basketball practice; it made an impression with him too. I caught him explaining to his mother how he was a “digital native” while she was only a “digital immigrant.”

Most importantly, I began to rethink my approach to teaching my lower level math students, my Introduction to Algebra students. It hadn’t dawned on me that this was what those students needed. I took this class to the computer lab on a Friday and played addition and subtraction games for 47 minutes. That night at our football game, I had 4 students come up to me and tell me how much fun they had in math class and that math used to be their worst subject, the one they hated the most and now it was their favorite. Friends were jealous; friends in honors classes were asking me if they could take my class. I just thought it was a good day in class. I hadn’t realized that that was the way those students learned the most, the way that engaged them the most. Instant gratification, short burst of learning, hidden from them because they were having fun, playing games.

Is it possible to make every day like that? No. It is like a tolerance for drugs. Give them a day of fun; you need to top it the next time and the next time. But engaging them in this matter 2 or 3 times a week might just do the trick.

Final Webquest

Here's my final Webquest:http://students.ed.uiuc.edu/bcfrey2/bradfeportfolio/webqueststartpage.html

Webquest Troubles No More

Apparently it was the student server's problem. Here is my 2nd draft of my webquest: http://students.ed.uiuc.edu/bcfrey2/bradfeportfolio/webqueststartpage.html

Media in Learning

Media has always been an important component in schools and learning. I think back, way back, to watching film strips on the great depression in grade school. What a wonderful way to learn!

Now the media we present in school is far more dynamic and abundent. We thought TVs in the classroom was great and then we added VCRs. But we topped that with DVDs and United Streaming. I go one better, I have Directv in my room with TIVO to record whatever I want.

We can go to the computer lab or bring in the laptops and the world is right in their palms. With so much information available to students, how do we get them to soak it all in, soak any of it in. I think the secret lies in letting them create. Even though I teach math, I am intrigue by the many opportunities that students have to create an online journal of their knowledge.

This semester I will be giving one of my classes a webquest regarding travel. Part of their assignment is to document their vacation. Originally I had planned on giving them Power Point to create a travel documentary, but now I am considering a couple of others. www.scrapblog.com is a fun place to create an online scrapbook. It is very easy to use and with the option of adding music, students would really enjoy this option. A second option for the students is www.jumpcut.com. This is a very simple site that lets users make short movies by using pictures, music, video clips and many special effects. I had fun playing around with this site. I actually made a short music video with pictures of my kids.

Webquest Troubles

If anyone was looking at my 2nd draft webquest, you noticed that it is exactly the same as the first draft. Apparently, none of the files I saved went to my student server. My desktop is back from its weeklong visit to Best Buy and I should be able to save the files now. Stay tuned. Sorry about the trouble.

Web Based Media

It's too bad Michael's live presentation went South on us. After listening to it recorded, I was geeked over all the tools he presented on the page http://uiucmtw.wikispaces.com/WebBasedMediaBigList. What a wealth of tools! I can't wait to jump in a try a couple of these. As it was, I had tried a few:

In www.blogger.com, I have http://bradfrey.blogspot.com/ for this class, http://skyhawkgirlsbasketball.blogspot.com/ for my girls basketball team and http://skyhawkgolf.blogspot.com/ for my golf team.

We created some wiki pages for another CTER class: Success in Math Class and Competition in the Math Classroom.

I have used http://picasa.google.com/ to post pictures to my blogs.

I have a bloglines account, although I don't check it enough. I like what Michael said about setting up my classmates blogs in my blogline account to have an easier way of checking posts.

http://pages.google.com/ is a very simple way to set up web pages. I did a very short one using google at http://coachfrey.googlepages.com/.

As soon as I get my digital camcorder, I am hoping to utilize the podcasting tools and create short instructional videos for my students to download to their video iPods.