Digital storytelling is way to tell stories using the digital technologies that are available to you. Digital storytelling is much like oral storytelling you just have many more tools at your disposal. You can use videos, text, pictures, and audio to help tell your story. There does not seem to be any hard set rules to digital storytelling. You can use it for just about anything that you want to tell a story about. It just helps you to be able to have more tools for you to get your point across.
This can be a great tool to let your students be creative. Once you give them the guidelines for the assignment you can let them go and see what they come up with. It is a really great way to see what type of artistic talents your students have. For younger students you may want to just do one as a class so you can guide them along more.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Global Education Community
Through searching on the internet I was able to find a website that helped to connect classrooms from all over the world to each other. This website helps to facilitate discussions between students from all over the world. The website sets up teaching units which gives a topic for the students to write about. Then the students are able to correspond with each other about how things are different it their different parts of the world. For example you could decide that you would like to know more about cultural traditions in France. So you could post on this websites discussion board that you were looking for a French classroom to correspond with. Then when a class from France answered you your students could email back and forth answering each others questions about cultural traditions. This could be a great way to find out how people live in different parts of the world. I also like the fact that it just uses email. This could be a easy thing to enrich current curriculum, and would not add any extra expenses to your budget.
Website: http://www.epals.com/
Website: http://www.epals.com/
The State of Teaching
For my most recent blog post I read other blogs about what is happening to teachers around the country. It seems like some of the educational blogs take a bit of a break during the summer, but I read many interesting posts about the issues facing teachers that were written earlier in the spring. These posts were written about what is happening to the teacher profession due to the recent attacks on teacher's unions in the last couple of months.
It seems that many people feel that education is the first place to cut when budget deficits come up. They feel that since states standardized test scores have not improved this is a sign that teacher do not deserve to be compensated as they were in the past. They feel that instead of spending more on education to make it better, they can make it better by paying teachers less. This is not to say that scores cannot come up without spending more money. I am sure that there are many things out there that can be done to make educational districts more effective and efficient. People will say that regardless of class size or technology in the classroom there is no replacement for a good teacher. If this is true, which I believe it is, then the best way to recruit the best and brightest is NOT to pay them less. If you are a recent high school graduate and you have studied hard and gotten into a really good school why would you work hard for four years to get a job where people think you are overpaid, lazy, and you have to put up with screaming parents all day? Instead they will go into engineering or business where they can make way more money and not have to deal with all of those negatives.
The parallel that I always use when talking with people about this is how people treat military funding. When the U.S. military has trouble achieving their goals, like they have in Iraq and Afghanistan, people argue that they need more funding and man power. Which I agree with and am glad that they get the support they deserve. But when people see that educational systems are not meeting their goal they blame the teachers and cut funding instead of giving teachers the additional funding and support they need to make a real difference in the American public school system.
It seems that many people feel that education is the first place to cut when budget deficits come up. They feel that since states standardized test scores have not improved this is a sign that teacher do not deserve to be compensated as they were in the past. They feel that instead of spending more on education to make it better, they can make it better by paying teachers less. This is not to say that scores cannot come up without spending more money. I am sure that there are many things out there that can be done to make educational districts more effective and efficient. People will say that regardless of class size or technology in the classroom there is no replacement for a good teacher. If this is true, which I believe it is, then the best way to recruit the best and brightest is NOT to pay them less. If you are a recent high school graduate and you have studied hard and gotten into a really good school why would you work hard for four years to get a job where people think you are overpaid, lazy, and you have to put up with screaming parents all day? Instead they will go into engineering or business where they can make way more money and not have to deal with all of those negatives.
The parallel that I always use when talking with people about this is how people treat military funding. When the U.S. military has trouble achieving their goals, like they have in Iraq and Afghanistan, people argue that they need more funding and man power. Which I agree with and am glad that they get the support they deserve. But when people see that educational systems are not meeting their goal they blame the teachers and cut funding instead of giving teachers the additional funding and support they need to make a real difference in the American public school system.
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