Story telling....the digital way

Stories are now available on the Internet.  You can read online books made available by Google or Amazon, or if you're feeling adventurous, you can create your own digital story.  To create a digital story, you can combine voice, sounds, pictures, movies, and written words.  You don't have to have all of these elements, but there are several websites that can help you along your way.

The Center for Digital Storytelling hosts open workshops for teachers to come and create a digital story.  These workshops are three days long, and can be a real help to teachers who are lacking in technology backgrounds.  The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling published by the University of Houston gives a list of the things necessary to create a digital story.  There are five essential steps; Choose a topic/write a script, collect resources, select content/develop a storyboard, import/record/finalize, and demonstrate/evaluate/replicate.  Each one of these steps is broken down into easier steps for those who need guiding.  They even have a link for downloadable tools for those who are ambitious enough to start now.

Digital stories are a great way to cross the barrier between learning at home and school, all while integrating technology and creativity into the classroom.

Global education communities

Due to the numerous education sites, it's hard to not connect with global education communities.  A cite I found is called Curriki.  This website has thousands of lesson plans that teachers are sharing with one another for grades K-12.  When visiting the site, you can limit your results to grade level, topic, type of resource, and style of lesson (game, unit, etc).  This is more for teachers to connect with each other, but I thought it was too good to not mention.

When it comes to a global community that students can reach out to, http://www.epals.com/ is a great resource.  This site connects classrooms in 200 countries, and is monitored to ensure safety.  Google listed many sites for "elementary school global community" but epals was at the top of the list.  Together as a class, we can choose a country, possibly one we will study, and choose a school to communicate with throughout the year.  Students will email their e-pal and learn about the culture in a place different than their home.  Students can talk about themselves for the first few emails and understand what is similar and what is different from others their age.  There are many conversation starters, the examples below are from http://www.conversationstarters.com/101.htm

• Where did you grow up?
• Do you have any pets?
• Do you have any siblings?
• What did you do this past weekend?
• What are your plans for this weekend?
• What do you like to do in your spare time?
• What is the first thing you do when you wake up?
• What is the last thing you do before you go to sleep?
• What was the last thing you purchased?
• What is your favorite holiday?
• What is your favorite day of the week?
• If you could meet anyone in history, who would it be?
• What do you like to do to relax?
• Do you play any instruments?

Travelling in an online world

I love taking online tours of places that I'll probably never travel to in person.  http://www.nasm.si.edu/exhibitions/gal102/americabyair/ gives a tour, and several activities and stories about the National Air and Space Museum.  This is a great place for students to visit and hear first hand stories about people and their air travels.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/03/blue-whales/brower-text shows several pictures of the blue whales that were followed for the National Geographic show that was filmed in 2009.  The pictures are accompanied by an article written by a man who followed the whales.  Many students would be able to dive into the ocean and follow these whales in a virtual world, achieving something they wouldn't do in their lifetimes.

http://sites.asiasociety.org/education/islam_in_seasia/ has an interactive map and several other educational activities for students who are studying the Islamic religion.  It was interesting to click on the different years and watch how Islam spread from 632 to the 1800s.  This may not be an early elementary link, but for 5th, 6th, middle or highschool grades, this website would be great.

The most important thing from reading someone else's blog post is that there will always be links others know about that you don't.  The internet is a huge resource, and when others take the time to record good resources, we should take the time to visit a few and see if we could use them in our classroom.