Techszewski

Spring Fever

It's a new season so that must mean it's time for me to post to my blog. It's not that I don't have a lot to say. I'd just rather be doing other things than sitting in front of my computer. I have much to say about digital storytelling and using technology effectively in educational settings. A few weeks ago, my school was fortunate to bring Scott McCloud to speak about his work in comics. If you have not seen his TED talk, grab something to eat and plop yourself down in front of your computer for twenty minutes of the best live digital storytelling I've seen since Dana Atchley's Next Exit performance. Scott uses only a series of slides behind him to help him tell the story of his life in comics, but he really makes it compelling by his choice of images and the pace at which he uses them. My head is still swimming with ideas from his talk. I had so many students and teachers tell me afterwards that his presentation was the most enjoyable they've seen in all of the Powerpoints they've been subjected to over the years.

Since Scott's talk I've been thinking a lot about tools and online resources to help teachers and students tell an effective story. It's been almost five years since I finished my thesis on digital storytelling in the classroom and I still contend that if we expect students and teachers to use technology effectively we need to teach them HOW to tell a good story. Not so much the ability to tell a good oral story, but how to select and combine images, text and audio that effectively conveys their message.

I'm embarrassed that most of the links on the right side of this blog are probably obsolete. I haven't updated them in years. But that will change soon. I've set out to find the best tools/resources online that teach story. I'm casting the net wide and looking at everything from radio (NPR) to comics sites, such as Scott's. There are many places on the web you can watch, listen, read and even create a story, but there's still very few places that have the specific purpose of helping teachers teach story. And I'm not just talking about teaching traditional storytelling. We have drifted far from our ability to relate information in an engaging way. Maybe that's why I don't blog frequently. I'm skeptical that it's that effective of a tool. It's definitely much better than Twitter or Facebook. At least that's where I'm at currently in my opinions on social networking tools.

So send your sites my way. Where on the web can we point teachers and students to for help in improving their story skills?

My Proudest Moment

A few months ago, I set a goal for this year to help produce 500 digital stories. I'm 75 digital stories closer to the finish line. With the Spanish digital stories and now this set, I'm at about 120. But it's not about the numbers.

The most recent project involved the 6th Grade and focused on an accomplishment or proud moment. The project team consisted of four classroom teachers, myself and two very patient and flexible computer lab teachers. I met with the classroom teachers prior to launching the project and walked them through the process of completing a digital story. I'm a big fan of providing students with a template of what you expect them to complete, in addition to sharing with them a a finished digital story that illustrates what you expect them to do. For both Windows MovieMaker and iMovie (one class worked in the Mac Lab), I created a template where the students would open it and then have each step of the project illustrated for them in a short video. Still not sure how effective this was, but it cut down on requiring me to give a lot of direction instruction in MovieMaker and iMovie.

We met for 40 minutes each day. Spent about ten days writing our stories. Each student has a blog so we had them post a draft of their story to their blog and then told students to read and comment on each other's stories. Not surprisingly, 6th graders are not the most effective story coaches. It's still a  big challenge for a teacher to provide timely feedback to each student, but I find that this is what makes the difference between a narrated slideshow and an effective digital story. After students used Audacity to record their voice overs, they exported them as an mp3 and uploaded it to their blog to receive feedback on that. The feedback was sparse as many students were eager to move on to gathering images for their story and did not leave that many comments for the audio version of the story. The student's voice is the most engaging part of a digital story. Unfortunately, schools are not quiet places. We don't have that many quiet spaces and even with designating empty classrooms as quiet recording spaces, students still had some background noise in their voice overs. The kids can filter it out, but most adults stop listening once you hear some other voice in the background or the papers rustling. Next time, I think I'll tighten that process by using a schedule with time slots. The teachers can help by listening to students read the first section of their story aloud and if they sound ready, the student's name would be added to the recording queue. During the recording, we could pair each student with an adult or student who has just completed his recording who will oversee the process and ensure that the environment is quiet. The voice over is too valuable to leave to the student to handle alone.

I think a key component of this project was the flexibility of the
teachers. We had a window of about a month's time for the project, but
everybody wanted quality work and extended the time for students to
write and receive feedback on their stories. I'd much rather spend more
time on the script writing and less on making the final movie look more
polished. Few students used music or transitions and I don't think we
lost much. In total, I think the project took 6 weeks.

We uploaded the completed digital stories to our school YouTube channel. It was the easiest place to put them all (although I don't like all of the Promoted Videos that come up when you try to watch a kid-friendly movie). I have most of the supporting documents for this project on this wiki. Will be adding more soon.

 

Distinguished Colleagues

What happens when you cram a posh hotel conference room with sixty Apple Distinguished Educators for a week of geeking out on their MacBooks? Add to that Singapore's lovely sights and soothing sun rays and you can expect some exciting results.

I was fortunate to spend a majority of the time collaborating on a project with Amanda DeCardy and Jonathan Chambers, two of my colleagues from Shanghai American School. You would think that during the course of the school year we have several opportunities for professional development, but for technology PD we are often the ones providing the workshops, leaving little time for us to get together and pool our many talents, resources and ideas. We meet on a monthly basis and swap dozens of emails yet this is not the same as collaborating on a project that is meant for teachers to actually use with their students.

For several years, Apple has held week long institutes that provide invaluable opportunities for Mac-savvy educators to network, discuss educational technology challenges and often produce a project that showcases effective technology integration. I pitched the idea of having students collect stories from elders in their communities about how their city has changed. Amanda coined the project's title of "Wisdom Lost, Wisdom Found" and that really provided the context for the project. With any digital storytelling project, providing a clear purpose for why you're creating stories always helps. We were off and running from there. In the solution section of my thesis on digital storytelling, I suggested that providing teachers and students with a digital story template will improve the story teaching part of the project. Teachers and students need more than a few video tutorials on the technical side of creating a digital story. It only took me three years to finally follow through on this idea. In our project, we provide director's cut style videos that help teachers and students prepare for the field interview. We created a scaffolded approach to the editing process, detailing three options (quick and simple, moderate editing, advanced editing) for creating the final digital story. Check out the project: Wisdom Lost, Wisdom Found. See also iTooth by David Gran and Mikey McKillip.

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With all of those MacBooks in one room, you can bet there were many resources that people wanted to share. Below is a quick list shared by the group. Thanks to David Gran for his descriptions of each resource. I've reordered the list ranking them according to my preference. See his post about the conference here.

1. ClassTools - Free Flash-based games that you can modify for your lessons.
2. iTunes U - geared for higher ed. These are the type of schools we're preparing students for!
3. Sokoban game - best simple game that really challenges students' logic/spatial skills.
4. Skitch screen capture and manipulation, not sure how it works here in Asia, but I love the idea.
5. Planbook is web based planner that allows you to attach document. Throw away those paper calendars!
6. 30 Second Bunny Theater teaches students about story structure (it really does).
7. CosmoPod allows you to download and convert online movies from almost any set, similar to TubeTV.
8. Little Geometry - like most items on this list, it's Mac-only, but a very powerful little set of tools
9. Sailling Software provides applications that let you use your mobile phone to access and control your iTunes libraries, and even work as a remote control for your computer.
10. The Voices of Asia is a new blog authored by Apple Distinguished Educators in Asia.
11. Picture Sync allows you to upload your pictures to multiple online sites at once (i.e. Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Bubbleshare, Photobucket).
12. Mousepose - allows your keyboard to show up on the screen.
13. Xtranormal - create your own animations just by typing in text.
14. Diigo, the social bookmarking tool, can be used to correct student text through highlights and sticky notes.
15. ...and it's about holiday time, don't forget to go elf yourself.
16. Virtual Box allows you to run Windows or Linux on your mac (if that's your thing).

Scratching the Surface

My return to Boston this summer was primarily to see my family and friends. Second fiddle was the Scratch conference held at MIT. I love conferences during the summer. Teachers rarely turn their brains off completely from thinking of school, but during July and August you're removed far enough from your daily routines to think about school in a different way. Today was Day 1 of a gathering of people around the world who are using the free Scratch software developed by MIT. This year, I used this program with an after-school group of students interested in learning how to make video games. We didn't get very far into the program. I made the mistake of introducing it alongside other free game-making programs. The students were drawn more to the web-based Flash games. I had had plans to develop a whole course to teach video game creation through Scratch, but when the number of students dropped to 3 it lost its priority. This conference, though, has recharged my interest and I'm looking forward to pitching several ideas from this conference to my staff.

The key question for most teachers at the conference was how do I introduce Scratch to students and teachers? For me, the question had more to do with scaffolding the introduction of more complex coding concepts; moving students and teachers beyond the basics of what looks like something made with Powerpoint. The ready-to-use Scratch cards are perfect for getting the basics down. And the learnscratch.org site has some of the best sequenced lessons for teachers and students to work through. I think to get at more complex chunks of code, students could be presented with remixing challenges where they need to take someone else's Scratch project and manipulate the speed of a object on the screen. With this approach, you're asking students to deconstruct a Scratch project made by another student. This is where the scaffolding can work well. After students have solved one challenge, you introduce more challenges like adding speech bubbles, collision detection and loops.

Another strategy, I'll try is using themed Scratch projects to hook particular students and teachers. There's a huge number of anime projects on the Scratch website. The math and science concepts are growing but I haven't found many that do more than regurgitate information from a text book. Several presenters talked about using role-play to help students think through the code of their project. With a few students on stage, they would physically walk-through the code instructions behaving as if they were the objects on the screen. Audience members could also provide feed-back on solving particular challenges, such as how to create collision detection between two objects. This approach was a welcomed surprise to how I've seen programming taught in the past. Using creative movement to help students physically understand how if-then procedures work will appeal to many students.

I was really impressed with how much true constructivist and constructionist learning I heard discussed at this conference. For years, I've been on the fence about constructionist learning. My biggest qualm has been that it just doesn't fit with traditional test-driven classrooms. And that's exactly what Seymour Papert and Mitch Resnick responded to with their creation of tools like LOGO and Scratch to allow students to "imagine, create, play, share, experiment, and reflect." That might not be the exact cycle, but you get the idea. During the session on the ScratchEd site that's meant to serve the needs of educators using Scratch, I heard many teachers trying to map the entrenched school model onto Scratch, asking for resources to help use Scratch to teach their curriculum. I was one of them. I wish there were schools with a Media Lab type approach to learning. Places where students were truly encouraged to use their personal interest in a subject to guide their learning. I know this sounds like Montessori education, but constructionist learning theory is different. It's hard to document. I'll come back to it in a later post. Mitch's enthusiasm for creativity in education made me feel like I wasn't necessarily at an edu-tech conference. It was a gathering of people who believed in students and their ability to create, collaborate and demonstrate an amazing range of, sorry I can't avoid using it, 21st century skills.

A presenter used the term "safe failure" in his talk, the idea that Scratch provided opportunities for students to set out to build something and totally fall flat on their faces and not have any negative consequences attached to it. There may be some self-imposed ones, but those too are important. Schools have utterly failed at equipping students with basic problem-solving skills. I think this is largely due to the infrequency of these safe failure moments in academic settings.

Many sessions featured Scratch use for making video games, both with educational and entertainment goals. What I noticed in nearly all the presentations is the absence of any specific video-game teaching. This is a huge field and lots has been written about game design for teens. Maybe direct teaching is in conflict with constructionism. That's what I've never been able to resolve. The balance between assessing what skills the teacher needs to provide to the student and what you think is developmentally appropriate for them to discover on their own, that's the real challenge. There's a course that Bernie Dodge teaches where he has the teachers design board games and introduces the fundamentals of engaging games. I'll try a modified version of this with students this year. Creating a good game is hard. Why reinvent the wheel. Have students use games that already work, but just change the content to fit your needs. This I know is the complete opposite of constructionism, but I feel it's an important step before asking a student to create a game that's meant to teach or make a point. I found this book during a lunch break that really helps non-game designers understand the challenges behind making an engaging game.

This is similar to the main challenge I find in helping students create effective digital stories. You need to teach them how to do it. Why not give them stories and ask them to find the images that match the script, making changes along the way to add their unique voice to the story. I plan to use this scaffolding approach often this year for most projects that require students to create any kind of interactive multimedia project.

There was also a lot of talk at the conference about using Scratch to create and share stories among students in various countries around the world. The Scratch website makes the sharing part easy. I'll be watching to see how people interpret "story" and look for opportunities to incorporate digital storytelling practices. I'll be sure to include Scratch in my presentation on current approaches to digital storytelling at the Asian Digital Storytelling Festival in September.

Converting Essay to Digital Story: Lessons Learned

Let me get my ranting out of the way first. I hate Windows. And I hate MovieMaker. I'm getting my Made on a Mac tattoo re-inked this weekend. When it comes to creating multimedia projects on a PC, there are many options, but which ones are any good? I've yet to complete a project with a group of students on the PC that wasn't plagued by freakish glitches with file path names, program freezes, or just general computers behaving badly. In my test run of the program, I had few problems recording my voice over in Audacity, importing my audio and images, syncing everything, adding a title, and exporting the finished movie. But I've done this before. The key difference is that I did this all in one 90 minute long sitting. MovieMaker does something that makes it nearly impossible for students to work on a project over a few class periods. When students opened their projects on their second day, they were met with big red X's in place of their images and audio that they had spend an hour syncing the day before. Most times you can just double-click on the images and reconnect the path. It's misleading when you tell students to import their images and audio because that's not what MovieMaker does. It saves the target source. Why? In iMovie, when you import files becomes part of the project file. You don't have to worry about the file after that. Not with MovieMaker. If you move your images or audio files, you might as well start over. I had switched to MovieMaker from Photostory because it was easier to adjust the length of time an image stays on the screen. Photostory also has that odd path name glitch. Very frustrating because it makes no sense and it's nearly impossible to explain to students. The tech savvy ones figure it out and can work around it, but for the rest of the class they become intensely frustrated and squander valuable editing time dealing with these PC pitfalls.

I just wrapped up a digital storytelling project where students converted an essay they wrote about a country in Africa. Instead of the usual Powerpoint (the only reliable multimedia tool for the PC) to share their work, the teacher wanted to try something new. I created a template to help students see how they could convert their thesis statements to focus questions of a story. The focus question set up a story that would follow one of the following story models: Cause-Effect, Compare-Contrast, Analyze-Persuade, Describe-Conclude. Bernajean Porter puts these types of digital stories in the Beyond Words category. Different from the personal narrative, but still meant to move the audience in some way. That part, writing and creating multimedia projects that do more than just regurtitate facts is the real challenge for students.

I knew this would be challenging for most of the students, but it's an important skill for them to acquire. The sample story I created helped many see what we wanted. Overall, I'm very pleased the with the final projects. I get a sense that they learned much more than just facts about the countries they researched. This project brings my total of student-produced digital stories to around 500. With each project, I learn many new lessons. Aside from my profound dislike of MovieMaker, I'll take much away from this round of digital stories.

Lesson #1 Using a wiki to provide feedback to students during the script writing process is an easy, valuable tool to include. Although only a few students used the wiki, it was really helpful to
them in improving the quality of their scripts. The discussion forum on Wikispaces was simple and effective.

Lesson #2 Students have no idea how to find images for ideas, concepts, emotions, etc. It was fun to peak
over their shoulders as they were punching into Google Images phrases such as "political corruption in Nigeria" or "economic strife." Students need lots of practice in activities like assigning captions to
pictures or finding images for sections of a script. These are the types of short visual and media literacy activities that are essential to developing strong digital storytelling skills.

Lesson #3: No matter how many times you show students how to use the basic components of a program only your top 10% will remember it when it comes time for them to apply what you've shown them (and that 10% probably is tech savvy enough to figure things out on their own). Students still need written instructions on the step-by-step approach to the basic steps like editing and importing images and audio. I probably could have created a short movie that walks them thru the steps, but I'm lazy these days. Next time.

Lesson #4: When editing, students need a mouse and a set of headphones. Looking around the classroom, watching the students all listening to their stories with headphones was a great snap-shot of really engaging project-based learning.

Lesson 5: You always need more time than you planned for. We had 80 minute classes, but it was a tight schedule. They only had two days of work on the computer. Students who tried to download MovieMaker at home only found frustration when the red X's appeared because of the lack of portability of the program.

Lesson 6: Students need to be taught how to name files with descriptors that help identify it. Many students opened MovieMaker, started working then saved their project as "Movie" or "soc studies prj."


I'm fairly certain that for most students this was the first time they've been asked to "tell a story" that moved the audience. Many came close. A few really nailed it. Some still don't know the difference between a story and a report. This takes practice. I think teachers often are reluctant to take on a project like this because the end results can be less than stellar. But this is when teachers need to be reminded that we often ask students to apply many skills repeatedly. Despite being assigned dozens of Powerpoint presentations in their school career, only a third of most classes have students creating engaging and effective presentations. I still remain convinced that a digital storytelling project forces students to develop, practice, and apply the wide range of visual and media literacy skills that will produce truly digitally literate students.

ICTs, Digital Literacy and Digital Storytelling

 

I'm changing my job title from Technology Integration Specialist to ICT Integration Specialist. Maybe then I'll get a chance to demonstrate how technology in educational settings is linked to developing students' digital literacy skills and not a separate set of software skills. Also, maybe then teachers won't confuse me with the person who was hired to fix their computer. ICT Standards have made my job a lot easier. When teachers are presented with a set of standards that emphasize effective communication with technology they often feel that this makes more sense to them than "doing technology for technology's sake." 

When we talk about 21st century skills for our schools, one key strand is digital literacy. While some teachers and administrators see these terms as buzz words that muddle school reform conversations, it can't be denied that technology use is integral to the development of students' current literacy skills. The ICVET website explains that:

Today’s technology driven society also requires digital literacy, which means that an individual can read and write digitally in order to 'access the Internet; find, manage and edit digital information; join in communications; and otherwise engage with an online information and communications network...' (Blackall, L 2005). Digital literacy also includes an ability to 'identify…integrate, evaluate, analyse and synthesize digital resources, construct new knowledge, create media expressions, and communicate with others, in the context of specific life situations, in order to enable constructive social action; and to reflect upon this process' (DigEuLit project, 2006).

According to these definitions, some may say that Facebook has facilitated students' digital literacy skills more than their daily classroom work.  I've spent the last ten years helping students and teachers communicate information in story form using technology. To me, digital storytelling helps develop story literacy, media literacy, and visual literacy. When implementing a digital storytelling project and teachers address the skills associated with these three literacies then we're on the path of developing digitally literate students.

Eliot Eisner wrote in The Kind of Schools We Need that "what we ought to be developing in our schools is not a narrow array of literacy skills limited to a restrictive range of meaning systems, but a spectrum of literacies...to serve as a vision of what our schools should strive to achieve." I'd also include procedural literacy as a component of digital literacy. Students who can use entry-level programming tools, such as Scratch or ALICE are learning a set of skills that transcend manipulating a machine. They are learning the key steps of the iterative design process that will be a part of many 21st century jobs.

I just finished Jason Ohler's new book Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning, and Creativity. When I was writing my thesis on Supporting Digital Storytelling in Grades 4-12 (Download TB_thesis_2008_edits.doc), I found the earlier draft of this book on his website. Thrilled at the clear language he used and his support of Kieran Egan's storytelling work, I felt his first draft was the best book to date on helping teachers understand digital storytelling in the context of the classroom and within the larger pedagogical domain of "So, why is this important?" Unfortunately, it was too good. I hit a wall with my thesis, feeling deflated that he'd beat me to the punch, and said everything I had planned to say. But I pushed on and found that I still had a lot to say about the challenges teachers face in planning a successful digital storytelling project and the continuing challenge of how exactly do we teach students to tell a story. This version of his book covers it all - the important connection between communicating with digital tools and literacy development, visualizing story development, media grammar, and recommendations for necessary computer equipment.

I really feel that this book should be required reading for all teachers. One of Ohler's frequent reminders to teachers is "story first, technology second." But I find that when I mention "story" to teachers they feel that this is a step backwards in their drive to develop 21st century learners. I've got to find a new term. Telling a good story is hard, just as is writing an engaging five paragraph essay. It's often overlooked that students receive far more drill in essay writing than story practice. In every digital storytelling workshop I've run, when I ask participants to tell a story about themselves, it is a very foreign experience for them. Telling an engaging, convincing story should be a skill that we impart to our students (as well as making sure they can tell at least one good joke). Although story does not appear in many ICT documents, it does remind that us that story is one of the oldest ways that information has been communicated, and it should not be abandoned in the Information Age. 

We need to make sure we give students the tools to create engaging digital stories, podcasts, Powerpoints, animations, and larger multimedia productions. The story spine and story mapping templates were just a few resources from Ohler's book that I'm looking forward to testing out with students soon.

Story Spine

Once upon a time...
Everyday...
But one day...
Because of that... (repeat three times or as often as necessary) Until finally...
Ever since then...
And the moral of the story is...(optional)

Virtual Portrait of a Story (VPS)

A digital story adds the new challenge of doing what Bernajean Porter refers to as "dancing text, images and audio together on the screen."  A key step that is easily confused with storyboarding is what Ohler refers to as "story mapping." The simple visualization tools Ohler encourages are invaluable to teachers who feel very comfortable with a template for students to follow. Porter's book DigiTales: The Art of Telling Digital Stories is another excellent resource for teachers wondering what digital storytelling has to offer them.

Meet My Voki

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The foreign language classroom and digital storytelling potential of a Voki is extensive.

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Visual Grammar: My 2 Cents

I spent the last two weeks working with middle school students on two projects that rely heavily on careful selection of images to support what they're trying to say. Even after ten years of helping students with multimedia projects that require them to select an image to convey an idea or support a part of a voice over, I'm stunned at how some students have no idea of where to begin when it comes to finding an image to go along with statements like "My mom is very nice" or "I use to live in Mexico." I don't think it's a simple case of right-brain vs. left-brain. For all the time I've spent researching how to help students write an engaging script for a digital story, I could write just as much about the challenges students face in thinking visually.

I first heard the term "visual grammar" from Joe Brennan during an interview with him on his approaches to digital storytelling. His job title of Visual Literacy Instructor was new to me. I was more than a bit jealous when he told me he spent most of this time helping students acquire the essential media literacy skills that so many school curricula omit. We expect students to use tools like Powerpoint, PhotoStory and iMovie but often overlook the pre-requisites to effectively using these programs. By effective, I don't mean they know how to add transitions, crop or import images. Students need to learn how to do what Bernajean Porter (read Beyond Words) refers to "dancing text, images and audio together" so that the elements convey an intended point. Few students pick this skill up without explicit instruction.

While it's not hard for students to locate images with the help of Google, Flickr, and Yahoo, they tend to select vague and literal interpretations of what they're trying to say. It would be a fantastic plug-in for Google Images and other image databases if you were prompted with questions that helped narrow your search to better match your intended image need. Now, we wouldn't need this if students understood and practiced Boolean search methods. But even they did use "quotes" and + or - in their keyword searches, they still wouldn't be thinking of what would be the best image for their script. A student was looking for an image to match a part of his script where he said "My grandfather was in the Army in World War II." He typed in "army" and got dozens of current military images. I asked him a few questions about his grandfather. Fascinating story: born in Hong Kong, sold to an American, brought to the US, joined the US Army during WWII. I suggested he use one of the images that featured WWII era soldiers. I was eager to hop on a computer and tackle the challenge of finding an image of a Chinese American soldier from WWII. Later, when I entered "Chinese American soldier WWII" into Google Images I found several images.

Next time I help students with any project that relies on images to get across a particular point, I think I'll go thru a few image search exercises like the scenarios described earlier.

Google just added the Image Labeler tool that might be good practice for students. It looks like they're essentially getting the public to help tag all of their images.

Remember, integrating multimedia projects with your students requires you to think about what's developmentally appropriate to expect of your students. Most elementary and middle schools haven't even had much experience putting together a narrated slideshow. They've all been assigned Powerpoint projects, but haven't received specific instruction in how to make them successful. Try to give them frequent opportunities to interpret images from magazines, posters, websites and news papers. There's a fun drama game that kids love. Use a set of postcards with unique scenes, people, settings, and actions on them. Tell students to select an image and give it a caption, then they could take on the personality of one of the characters in the scene.

Story Bait

I see stories unfolding around me all the time. I'm intrigued most by the stories from those people whose voices are never encouraged or validated. How can a community really grow if it doesn't try to increase the volume and representation of its members? This is what I think must be one of our main priorities as educators working in school environments. Over the past the week at school, there were several big events that generated perhaps hundreds of stories. Unfortunately, these stories will probably never reach more than a few sets of eyes and ears. The photos from the International Fair, Habitat for Humanity trips and China Alive trips will sit on a few dozen computers, maybe they'll be uploaded to Flickr or  someone's Kodak photo-sharing site, a few will end up in the yearbook. How could a school capitalize on the media that's generated by its members? How could you use the photos, video and audio that's recorded to craft stories about the event to share with the larger school community?

Even before you try to pull stories out of people, there's a lot that can be done to facilitate crafting a story. Getting people to upload their photos to one site, such as Flickr or Picassa (to take advantage of the geo-tagging feature) and tagging them with a common tag like "2007 China Alive" would go far to document the collective experience of a big trip. Further along the scaffolding process, you could use the site tabblo and have people upload their photos to a 2007 China Alive group. The commenting feature in tabblo starts the conversations that could lead to a story. The jump from anecdote to story isn't that big of a leap, but answering the question "how did the experience change you?" is what makes a story more appealing than just rambling on about disconnected details. Stories do not all have to contain a profound revelation. As long as they add your voice to the mix in a meaningful way then you've enriched the community.

Master storyteller Jay O'Callahan calls them sparks. He asks people in his workshops to tell a two minute story about shoes or an accomplishment you're proud of or something very basic that nearly everyone has experienced. Sadly, we don't make room for these story sparks in most school programs. I think schools need "story bait" spread around their campuses. I worked on a project a few years ago where we put up neon orange Xs around our school's campus and downtown Atlanta that asked "You Are Here. Why?" The signs had a phone number and instructions to call and leave a story about why the person was at that particular place at that time. All of the stories were automatically accessible online and via their cell phones. I'd like to do something much more low tech for my school here. I'd take a few of the photos from the trips, enlarge them to poster size, post them in the halls and cafeteria with some "story bait" underneath the photos. Maybe a leading statement like "I learned something new about myself." The poster could tell them to call a web-based phone number that records 1 minute of audio. There could also be a website that allows them to enter their stories in text, audio or digital story.

I'll flesh this out this week. In traditional digital storytelling, you start with a story circle where the f2f contact with a group plays an important role in starting down the story path. This approach is different, but in this instance the context of the trip is set and that grounds the story. If I want to try other story bait ideas, overcoming the issue of context is central. The good thing about a school environment is that the school itself provides the basis for so many stories.

When the Muse Calls

It's nearly 3am here in Shanghai and I've got technology on the brain. Since leaving friends, family and my beloved Red Sox on the Atlantic coast and bumping the population here in Shanghai to 18,000,001, I haven't had many moments when I had edu-tech ideas buzzing in my blood. But, tonight I've got online communities on the brain, specifically how to build successful ones for schools. And I think I'm staring at some textbook examples of how a successful online community could fill some pressing needs.

Example #1: Along with about 150 teachers, I live within a ten minute walk to the school. Shanghai American School has two campuses: Puxi and Pudong. I live and work on the Puxi side. When you combine the two campuses you probably have nearly 400 people including the teachers and their families.

The Need: Shanghai is not an easy city to navigate on so many levels. It took me three weeks to find dishwasher detergent and dryer sheets, I haven't bought fresh vegetables for fear of the rumored frightening fertilizer treatments, and figuring out the basic policies of my apartment complex has left me wondering when the Ex-pat's Guide to Working and Living in Shanghai is going to appear in my mailbox(but i'm not really sure mail from outside "The Bubble" actually gets to me).

There are several websites that cater to the significant ex-pat population here, yet they are too vast in audience and fail to pool the body of knowledge that only gets shared in random run-ins with people on shuttle buses or over lunch. When I was living in Boston, Yelp was a fantastic resources. When I had a craving for the best donuts in town, I went to the site, entered "best donuts in Boston" in their search tool and immediately had a half dozen glazed options to explore with links to Google map directions and the key piece of info of how far away they were from my apartment. Our school tried to create an intranet to fill this need, but the reality is why try to recreate the wheel if it already exists. And who among us teachers is really a skilled wheel-maker these days? Yelp is restricted to the US right now, but craigslist expanded overseas. Why not borrow the code for creating a Yelp site and set-up a Shanghai Yelp site?

The company behind Yelp just received another $3m in venture capital support! Online communities are cash cows. There are so many schools around the world facing this need to easily disseminate info and allow its members to add to a shared knowledge base. Craigslist could serve our needs. The Shanghai section is evolving into something more than people looking for "friends" or "conversation partners." The  downside of the craigslist option for us is that it wouldn't be governed or created by us. I think if the SAS community knew there was a place to post questions, such as "Can anyone help me switch my Wii system so it's in English" or more pressing matters like finding a reliable dentist, they'd find it very helpful.

SAS has been here in Shanghai for many years. Thousands of teachers, parents and students have come and gone. Every teacher and family member has had to figure out Shanghai. When they leave without recording what they've learned about Shanghai, all of us newbies miss out on an amazing resource. It would be so sad to live here for a few years and not know that what others feel are the real gems of Shanghai.

The SAS online community could not only tell you the best place to find [insert chinese word here](dumplings), it could have photos of local and far excursions, a section helping ex-pats learn to speak Chinese, classifieds, DVD swaps, a page of scanned business cards with directions in Mandarin/Shanghaiease so people can just print them out and give them to the taxi driver. I can see this really taking off. Over the last few weeks, I've been in so many meetings and had so much info dumped on me that I've probably only digested 1/10th of it. And the real problem is when I need to find that info I have go crawling back thru an inbox that already has a couple hundred emails in it. An online community successfully organizes info so people can access it quickly. It nurtures a sense of belonging and keeps them coming back.

As usual the students are way ahead of the adults when it comes to using technology in their lives. Whether it's mySpace, Facebook or here in Asia Mixi and Cyworld, millions of students belong to these online communities. But when they come to school there's nothing like it available to them. Not yet.

Example #2: I'll try to be more concise in this example. A teacher asked me about helping her ESOL team get reacquainted with their use of Grouphub. Teachers spend an excessive amount of time looking for info they need to do their job. They rely on email to send and receive a dizzying array of info. They need to be able to share resources, create documents collaboratively and asynchronously, trust that those documents are secure, and have tools (other than Outlook calendars) available to them that help them manage lengthy To Do lists and 190 day marathon.

Schools are often at the mercy of "The Network." I'm not going to get into that in this post, but will say that one shoe doesn't fit all feet. Whether it's WebCT, Blackboard, StudyWiz or some other Learning Management System(LMS), you have to remember that each school is unique in its sense of community. I firmly believe that technology can nurture and sustain a genuine sense of community. With a careful assessment of the school's building culture, planning, and training, an online community will meet many of the school's needs.

More on this later. It's 4:30am and I'm supposed to go on a bike trip outside the city in a few hours. When muse calls, you have to listen. Tonight she took hold. I had few other ideas that need to be jotted down here so I can come back to them later.

• Post a challenge for students to find, describe and illustrate in a variety of ways the connection in Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows and the rise and fall of the Nazi regime
• With the new Evoca widget, teachers can post a passage from a current novel/textbook/print resource and have students respond by recording their response orally instead of text. Great differentiation support.
• With another new widget(can't remember the name) you can do PD by creating a Tech Teachers talk show to that teaches/showcases a particular use of technology in action