Gina's Blog

Last week I was invited to meet Christine, the manager of  Christchurch South Community Gardens, as part of my work for the NZTE E4E project. I am compiling a database of organisations that are willing to work with schools on mutually beneficial projects.

She is very keen to work with teachers and students of all ages and being a trained teacher herself is overflowing with ideas of how she could work with many subject areas.

We talked about some possibilities that exist – many outside of the obvious horticulture or science:

• Art/photography – designing and creating sculpture for the garden as part of a portfolio
• Drama – she would love a new play to replace the ‘black bin bag’ skit for young children
• English – transactional writing, creative writing, poetry
• Science – composting
• Technology – many design opportunities
• Social studies – history of the commons etc, values of the older generation returning in the recession
• Physical Education – designing holiday programmes, examining/analysing movement of gardening

The gardens are beautiful and surprisingly open to the street. I loved the fabric hexagonal compost design, the sandpit and the exotically painted compost bin. The whole place is a hidden treasure awaiting the creative teacher.

Well I conclude that digital stories can be a powerful tool for learning. On a larger scale, they can be employed as a tool for a whole school review process, but even using them as a reflective tool for a much smaller task was a great success! Perhaps it is because there is a need to use the creative imagination. Perhaps it is just because the teachers who turned up to the final workshop for this E4E project were typically willing and clever.

They only  had one hour and created very different products. I can share only one! The images contained in the others aren’t able to be published as they contained many pictures of students.

Rod and Adrian used Animoto to produce a wonderful little movie

And of course I would love to do this activity with students! I hope the teachers who enjoyed it last week will do just that.

The final workshop for the Christchurch Education for Enterprise (E4E) Cluster is on Thursday.

The day will begin with teachers creating a digital story to represent their learning over the last two years on this E4E project. To this end I’ve been looking at what others are saying about digital stories and what they are creating.

Curriculum Online has stunning examples of schools articulating how they are implementing the NZC. They are too complex for our hour and a half session but I’ve pinched some of their guiding questions and adapted them (thanks Christina!).

Allanah K has blogged her recent story-telling exercise with Principals. I like the focus of FIVE images and the challenge of having a common theme/prop running through all the images. When we did a similar exercise at Ultralab over 6 years ago, I remember Stephen asking us to encapsulate our message in TWELVE images!

Some ‘how-to’ videos on youtube are very basic – too much so for my audience methinks. Some wonderful examples are shared on BBC, and on this fascinating and quite gorgeous ‘story centre’ site.

Then of course I completely forgot about the Digital Citizenship professional development session we had here at CORE where we made our own digital stories on this theme, using copyright-free images and music.

Naketa and I had fun on animoto

Chrissie eloquently longs for Banksy in her class

Liz and Jo create poetry in motion

Derek, Matt and our special guest Margot make a thoughtful slideshow (downloadable PDF)

And Jedd leads us all (link coming soon)