Using On-Line Resources in the Classroom

Getting to know your students is easy in a language arts classroom where students spend so much of their time writing about themselves, discussing books that related to them personally, and composing poems about their hopes and dreams. Next school year I am hoping to use technology as an additional way to learn about my students and to have them get to know more about someone else.

I am planning a digital storytelling unit in which they use available technology to record audio, video, and embed pictures and other documents in order tell a story about themselves. Once they have learned the technology and the basic format of a human interest piece, I want them to find someone else to interview--a grandparent, community figure, someone with a story to tell--and have them use technology to tell the story of that person. Two on-line resources I have found for digital storytelling are:

http://www.storycenter.org/

http://electronicportfolios.com/digistory/
This project will change how I teach because it will be my first attempt to embrace technology in my classroom. I have worked extensively with a Smart Board and had my students in the computer lab for years working on Microsoft Word and Publisher, but these are relatively simple uses of technology. Creating digital stories will be a stretch for me. I have noticed with my own teenage daughter that the new craze is to make movies and post them to You Tube, and I think I could use the interest students have in movie-making to teach them basic narrative formats and human-interest feature stories.  Creating digital stories is a ready-made way to publish student work to a wide audience. We have a daily news program at my school, and I think our digital stories would be a nice addition to the morning news. Writing pieces typed on a word processor were much more difficult to "publish" to the school audience.School Tube has an example of  telling someone's story that I think would be a good example for my students.