Montana Writing Project Matter is a place for you to tap into one another's brains - to get ideas and suggestions from fellow teachers and add your voice to important conversations. Posting stories about your classrooms, wonderings and thoughts about curriculum, students, successes, challenges, high-stakes testing, standards, and, above all, writing - all of these have value in Montana Writing Project Matters. Often wonderings are accompanied by questions or requests for advice.
I love these types of digital storytelling projects—for the skills students develop, the products they create, and the community the whole process creates (within the classroom and within the wider community). Though I didn’t work with video with my students, I did a ton with photography and audio. (I was working my way up to video. By trial and error I figured out there was a certain level of skill I need to have, as well as a level of equipment and access for students to make sure projects run smoothly and the technology was a tool rather than a roadblock.)
One reason I liked them is the type of work included allows a wider group of students to share the educational spotlight. When projects require a different skill set, different students get to shine. Our goal is always to increase students’ skills, but it’s also nice to give those students who aren’t often recognized for their work a chance to shine and put them in the role as leaders and teachers when you can. When I had students doing interviews and recoding audio, I was always impressed by the natural speaking and conversation skills of students who’d struggled with writing. When you diversify the idea of what it means to effectively communicate, you increase the number of ways students can succeed and, in my experience, the number of students who succeed. Having multiple points of entry into an assignment is incredibly valuable. I still stick to some rules about approaching assignments (no adjusting fonts until final draft stage—its amazing how many class periods students can devote to getting just the right size, color, and style of title for their piece of writing) but I have loosed up a bit on other things. I realized some kids really do work best if they are allowed the freedom to first explore visual & audio stuff related to research topics (rather than forcing them to stick to the written words & coming up with a draft before freeing them to find “visual aides’ to support the writing). I realized this after having multiple students who didn’t even do whatever writing project we were working on began creating the slideshow or movie or brochure or whatever format we were working on to present the work and then realized they had to go back and actually do the writing and research so they had some content.
Sometimes including more components is a way to get students to write. It took me a while to realize that technology isn’t a reward, it’s a tool to help with brainstorming, organization, and writing.
2 comments:
This site has some intriguing uses of video projects across multiple grade levels. Gives ideas of other ways of doing and being.
I love these types of digital storytelling projects—for the skills students develop, the products they create, and the community the whole process creates (within the classroom and within the wider community). Though I didn’t work with video with my students, I did a ton with photography and audio. (I was working my way up to video. By trial and error I figured out there was a certain level of skill I need to have, as well as a level of equipment and access for students to make sure projects run smoothly and the technology was a tool rather than a roadblock.)
One reason I liked them is the type of work included allows a wider group of students to share the educational spotlight. When projects require a different skill set, different students get to shine. Our goal is always to increase students’ skills, but it’s also nice to give those students who aren’t often recognized for their work a chance to shine and put them in the role as leaders and teachers when you can. When I had students doing interviews and recoding audio, I was always impressed by the natural speaking and conversation skills of students who’d struggled with writing. When you diversify the idea of what it means to effectively communicate, you increase the number of ways students can succeed and, in my experience, the number of students who succeed. Having multiple points of entry into an assignment is incredibly valuable. I still stick to some rules about approaching assignments (no adjusting fonts until final draft stage—its amazing how many class periods students can devote to getting just the right size, color, and style of title for their piece of writing) but I have loosed up a bit on other things. I realized some kids really do work best if they are allowed the freedom to first explore visual & audio stuff related to research topics (rather than forcing them to stick to the written words & coming up with a draft before freeing them to find “visual aides’ to support the writing). I realized this after having multiple students who didn’t even do whatever writing project we were working on began creating the slideshow or movie or brochure or whatever format we were working on to present the work and then realized they had to go back and actually do the writing and research so they had some content.
Sometimes including more components is a way to get students to write. It took me a while to realize that technology isn’t a reward, it’s a tool to help with brainstorming, organization, and writing.
Post a Comment