Thinking about digital story telling as a whole school review process

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The power of digital story telling

As part of my job with the NZC Online project, I am privileged to visit schools and help them tell their curriculum story through video. Over the past three years I have found that many things about this process intrigue me.

Telling stories

We love telling stories. We love having people to listen to our stories. The NZC Online team are always warmly welcomed into schools and teachers, leaders, students and parents all open up and freely share their stories with us. In the process of telling these stories it is evident that the storytellers are gaining something through the telling. I often see the stories building on each other and twisting and turning like a flowing river, branching off and building in strength.

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My kids now love editing their stories

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Children hate editing, but editing can be fun
I wonder how many of you teachers out there have students who can’t wait to finish typing their stories so that they can get on with the editing.  Hmmmm!!!  Strange???  I don’t think I see any hands up.

“Yeah right!” I hear you mutter.  “Since when have kids ever enjoyed editing!!!*^@#”

Well now they can!

The real issue with editing for kids

You see, kids hate editing because the only thing they can see for their efforts is a big mess on their previously “OK” page—well almost OK.  Not only that, the next step in the painful process is to rewrite it—fine reward for all that hard work.  Even if they are using a computer and have no mess to clean up or rewrite, no-one can see how much effort they put into the task.  So, why bother!

Well now, all that can change, and you will be able to get kids to edit their work without that thunderous look you know they’re pulling behind your back.  In fact, they will be quite happy about it, as they really quite enjoy balloons—even  teenagers.

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Let’s guide them, protect them, and help them learn

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Learn Guide Protect banner logoI have just made a ‘bit’. Not a big ‘bit’, just a little ‘bit’. And I’m hoping that it’s a bit useful to teachers who are helping students learn about digital citizenship. And you can make a ‘bit’, too.

‘Bits’ are the individual resources on Netsafe’s new site, Learn | Guide | Protect. The site is organised around three strands:

  • “the skills students learn to keep themselves safe,
  • the guidance they need from educators to learn how to manage challenges,
  • the protective mechanisms schools can use to improve their immediate safety”.

The key to the site’s development lies in the fact that items are crowd-sourced. Anyone can make a resource—or ‘bit’—and assign it to one of the three strands.  The items can be mixed, mashed and combined to suit learning contexts and schools’ needs.

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Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices (S-STEP) Conference

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Herstmonceux Castle
Herstmonceux Castle (Photo by: 6mat1 at en.wikipedia)

It’s hard work, but I guess someone has to do it!

Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex, U.K. was the romantic venue for the recent S-STEP (Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices) International Conference, which I recently attended. The castle is in fact the Queens University (Ontario) Bader Study Centre in the UK.

S-STEP international conference
Attendees at the Self-Study of Teacher Practices (S-STEP) International Conference 2010

S-STEP is one of the largest special interest groups of AERA (the American Education Research Association). Its biennial residential conference is focused on action research and other forms of self-study for teacher educators. It is a small conference of c.150 leading teacher educators, representing something of a ‘who’s who’ of teacher education internationally. Everyone presents and is encouraged to be innovative in their forms of presentation – ‘stand and deliver’ is frowned upon almost as much as in our own ULEARN conference :-).

Most attendees were from the USA or Canada, and others came from Holland, Iceland, Belgium. There were about 10 Australasians present, and even a few local English teacher educators!

Popular education research topics and focus

Some repeating topics covered by papers included:

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To Office or not to Office—an answer to multiple doc versions?

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One thing we are keeping a close watch on here at CORE is the ongoing competition between the desktop Office Suites such as MS Office and Open Office, and the online alternatives from Google Apps and Microsoft.

Google Docs doesn’t quite do it all

Google Docs

We use Google Docs extensively for document collaboration, but find that when it comes to the final document production and formatting it still doesn’t quite cut the mustard, and resort to exporting to a desktop Office Suite for the final version.

The constant question then is, at what point is the document ready for the transfer? And once transferred do you end up with the age-old version problems, and then, do you still email copies around for comment…?

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