I don’t expect a lot of people to read this post, let alone actually click on the title in genuine interest. It’s not that I don’t think the meta-cognition that takes place around teaching and learning isn’t important, it’s just that many educators I encounter on a daily basis both within and outside of my school district are often not concerned with reflective or recursive practices that are vital to helping construct life-long learners. To be fair, it’s not always their own fault that they don’t express interest in helping students find ways to create their own learning environment; educators have families, second jobs, stresses from administration, assessments, evaluations, etc. and quite often many of us are just looking for the quickest way from point A (start of the school year) to point B (final exams/end of the year). I feel that the school district I work in does a better job than most at hiring and supporting teachers who reflect upon pedagogy (our middle school being a very effective model for supporting reflective teaching and learning practices), but it’s my opinion that a large number of school districts do very little (or nothing at all) in the way of articulating curriculum and designing schools that can effectively support three recursive practices that Gardner Campbell identified as key elements of teaching and learning in a post-lunch lecture at the 2009 Open Education Conference. If you’re so interested, you can watch the entire presentation below, but if you’re short on time, you can skip the video and go straight to my distillation of these three essential practices for teaching and learning at all levels. Narrating The first recursive practice laid out by Gardner Campbell is one which almost every learner has been doing, with or without the help of their teacher. Narration is writing, blogging, retelling, journalling, reflecting; all of the wonderful writing that we ask our students to accomplish in order to prove not just to us, but to themselves that they are in fact learning. Gardner simply takes it one step farther and asks that we as educators practice narration as well. Whether it’s through artist statements, poetry, or simply taking notes about a particularly terrible or amazing lesson, the art of articulating one’s own experience is a practice which has proven to be effective for many students and teachers. And you don’t even need technology to do it! Have your students write their thoughts down on scrap paper while thinking through a difficult assignment or task; or maybe carve out some time for reflection at the end of each of your units. You could even make Friday "narration day" in which students get to write about one fantastic and one terrible experience they had that week. Make it interesting and challenge students to come up with their own writing prompts, or create ones for them. Geting students to tell their own story is the first recursive practice that can begin to have a profound impact on their lives. Curating Simply narrating isn’t enough to instill students with the sense that what they think and how they think will affect them for the rest of their lives. They must curate their learning, organize their thoughts, and arrange it in ways that make sense to them. I imagine it is very much like John Cusack’s character "Rob" in the movie High Fidelity, in which after experiencing a particularly painful breakup, he completely re-arranges his massive vinyl collection according to biographical significance. The order in which he places his albums tells the story of his many loves and breakups over the years, and while we don’t necessarily need to get students to be constantly re-examining their love lives, we do need to instill in them a love for self examination and reflection. Portfolios of student work, assembling "best of" folders of writing for conferences, and reading previous work in an effort to re-asses its value in the face of new understanding means that narration and previous experiences are revisited, and sorted in a way that makes the learning process easy to follow. Again, technology doesn’t have to be used in order to do this. Technology helps with typical blogging platforms automatically curating archives, categories, and tags in a way that makes it easier to sift through one’s previous experiences, but any way in which we can encourage students and teachers to curate their own lives will help bring a better sense of accomplishment and achievement after accomplishing new tasks. Sharing Up until this point, a teacher could easily accomplish these recursive practices without technology, and to a certain extent sharing can be accomplished through many face to face strategies. However, the true potential of Gardner Campbell’s visions comes from the complete and total process of "narrate, curate, share" happening on the open web. Through individual blogging, connections among social networks like Twitter, or group conversations in a forum, students can begin to shape their own presence and existence as a life-long learner not just within the classroom, but in the real world. Gardner’s thoughts and theories can best be summed up in the statement "put it out there!" Get students sharing through their own personal blog at Kidsblog, activate Blogger on your Google or Google Apps for Education account, or find someone in your school district that’s savvy enough to get your very own installation of WordPress (my personal favorite) on a school web server. If you’d rather have a collaborative group effort or conversation you could go setup a free forum at FreeForum, Forumer, or install your own copy of phpBB or BBpress with the help of that same tech-savvy individual that setup WordPress for you. The point is to make it open, accessible, and live to the rest of the web, rather than behind the shroud of an LMS, or the curtain of privacy of an "education friendly" service. While I realize this may not be possible in some districts due to policies or comfort level of the teacher, it’s an eventual necessary step that students must take at some point in their K-12 experience if they are to become better prepared for life beyond school. Feedback I told you that Gardner Campbell laid out three recursive practices for effective teaching and learning, so why then is there a fourth one that I’ve included here? Transitioning to narrating, curating, and sharing on the web requires a crucial step that isn’t immediately apparent to some teachers who are used to the informal discussions and feedback that happens face to face in the classroom. For students and teacher to truly be immersed in what Gardner calls their own personal cyberinfrastructure, feedback from others is the extrinsic motivator that pushes individuals forward if they struggle to do so on their own. Gardner however, warns of providing too much feedback or "training wheels" that are often typically never matched with a gradual release of responsibility that allows students to struggle and grow on their own: "Pointing students to data buckets and conduits we’ve already made for them won’t do. Templates and training wheels may be necessary for a while, but by the time students get to college, those aids all too regularly turn into hindrances. For students who have relied on these aids, the freedom to explore and create is the last thing on their minds, so deeply has it been discouraged." - Gardner Campbell, A Personal Cyberinfrastructure So what does this mean for providing feedback, then? As the teacher you must find that balancing point between providing feedback on student blogs, comments on wikis, or notes left in collaborative google documents, and letting the learner narrate, curate, and share on their own. Too much feedback, and the student will always expect it, no matter how trivial the topic or piece shared. Too little, and the learner will feel as though their work does not warrant the attention of the teacher. While many veteran teachers can do this almost automatically in a face to face setting, to do so online can be exceedingly difficult as the experience blurs distinctions between "work time" and "free time", with students and teachers narrating and sharing when the mood strikes, rather than the dedicated time you have with one another in a traditional classroom setting. It’s also highly important that students are offering feedback to their peers, and reacting to that feedback in a way that models good constructive criticism and improving upon ones work. Opening up students work to the web means that it’s not just the teacher that’s responsible for leaving the feedback and providing that extrinsic motivation for continued growth; it’s now on the shoulders of everyone in your learning community to help one another in a much more public and open way. I could continue to drone on about the need for students to publish, reflect, curate, and receive and react to feedback, but I don’t have to; the increasingly relevant Common Core Standards already call for this to happen at all levels of K-12 using technology. The question then is not really should we be doing this in education, but are you prepared to have your students narrating, curating, sharing, and offering feedback openly? I’m sure many are already doing this within the walls of their classroom with pencil, paper, and perhaps a Google Doc or two. It’s time now to explore what happens when you open the door wide and begin to invite other learning communities into your own through the web.

"Hey McFly, you bojo! Hoverboards don't work on water!" What is digital storytelling? Rather than bore you with a rather lengthy history of the term, and how it has been applied in the past to both the realms of education and entertainment, allow me to illustrate how I see it with a highlight from Wikipedia: You can continue to read on, and ponder why someone would arbitrarily decide that 8 minutes is the acceptable limit for digital stories, but what’s most important about the term is the practice of "ordinary people" creating meaning through the use of digital tools. Further exploration of the term through the lens of ds106 could even cause someone to conclude that digital storytelling is in fact, NOT just movies. The use of movies to tell a story is merely one facet of the digital storytelling spectrum, and as far as I’m concerned, a much better definition of the term exists further down that same entry on Wikipedia: "One can define digital storytelling as the process by which diverse peoples share their life story and creative imaginings with others." As I prepare for a presentation on digital storytelling at the upcoming 2012 MACUL Conference, I’ve begun to ask myself how teachers can more easily adapt newer technological tools to allow students to share their own "creative imaginings". Not being someone who is comfortable "talking the talk" without producing some actual goods, I decided to create another entry in my "Warning to the User" series, which is my own creative take on the Warning Assignment on the ds106 site. The assignment in question asks creators to imagine a warning poster or label for something that exists only in your own imagination or a movie. I had previously created a warning poster for the flux capacitor (the device that makes time travel possible in the Back to the Future movies), and I wanted to extend upon that thread in a playful way, hence a warning poster for the hover board used by the main character in the series, Marty McFly. The first in my series of warning posters for BTTF What speaks to me most about this assignment is that while I put a considerable amount of time into the process using Photoshop to assemble the images and the text (even going so far as to find and install a custom font inspired by the movie), it’s actually a rather simplistic assignment. Any teacher or student could achieve the same with a word processing program and some clipart quite easily. Making sure that images are set to floating or "wrap behind text", it would be quite easy to fill a page with a few choice elements from a film or book, and then use text boxes to place key points, main events, or themes from the story. I could see elementary students using a "warning label" to describe the main events in the book Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, or perhaps some magical warnings for using a wand from the Harry Potter series (highlighting all the times wands were mishandled in the series). I choose to mix plot points, scenes, and over-arching story elements from the first Back to the Future movie in my warning poster (lightning storms and technology don’t mix well in any timeline). However, any teacher could ask students to focus just on main events to practice sequencing, or include quotes from the main characters to help identify how mood is established in a story. While all of us in K-12 continue to "hover" around the impending implementation of the Common Core Standards, it might serve us well to begin to explore how a little bit of creativity might help students (and ourselves as educators) figure out how to reintegrate some of the process standards and college readiness standards in ways that will encourage students using a diverse set of tools to write, produce, and publish. Case in point; I used Google image search, an image editing program, and a blogging tool to create, narrate, and publish this particular piece. Toss in a little piece on using the advanced image search or a creative commons search for images and you have yourself quite the well-rounded 21st century project for your students!

not necessarily my own opinion, just exploring a point I have a pathological need like to argue. It’s something that I was apparently born with, as my mother insists at a very young age I was quite obviously cut out to be a lawyer. Despite my best efforts at self-monitoring and awareness of this trait, I often relapse into base level arguments when unprepared for a conversation that may challenge my viewpoints. Perhaps that’s why I was drawn to create the image above for the ds106 Big Caption assignment. While some may question the taste of the piece (it certainly doesn’t reflect my own personal beliefs), I wanted to create something that could be used as a way to provide a contrasting viewpoints, rather rational or not, to a topic of interest that students and teachers wrestle with. In this case, I found an image from Boston.com’s Big Picture photo journalism project, an amazing look at news from around the world through striking imagery. You can see the original image of a woman looking out through the ice-covered window of a bus in Bucharest below. I took the image into Photoshop and added the text, applied some simple effects (stroke and color fill), and viola! The end result is meant to be slightly tongue-in-cheek, but the idea is to try and provide a conversation piece that might provide a contrast to a topic you’re covering in class, or perhaps just practice rhetorical skills. A woman looks out a bus in Bucharest on February 2, 2012. (Vadim Ghirda/Associated Press) Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not in favor of global warming, but quite often the more important discussion of how global warming will affect the lives of everyone on this planet is overshadowed by the much more mundane argument of whether it actually exists. That doesn’t sit right with me, as while I am capable of arguing over almost anything, I’d like to think that I’m discussing a topic that will lead to answers and results with greater value for everyone. Disproving global warming isn’t going to help anyone if it still happens, but talking about how cultures, countries, and citizens might have to change their long term living patterns seems as though it might be a bit more important. I love the Big Picture site that this ds106 assignment is based upon, and the idea of captioning of striking image with a humorous, insightful, or other type of caption was made popular by the Big Caption website (warning: not all images and captions are appropriate for the K-12 setting). Forgetting the captions for a moment, there is a near constant flow of amazing images from around the world on the Big Picture site that could be used for classrooms talking about current events, or want a way to bring the world into their classroom in a very humbling manner (see the rest of the images from the European winter which has many homeless living in underground heating vents). Imagery, especially such vivid photographs as those taken from around the world by professional photo journalists, can play a very intimate and important role in spurring discussion, or illustrating a point. I highly recommend any social studies or language arts teachers to give the site a look, and see what you could take from it for use in your classroom.

Cheerios, the breakfast of middle class families across America! Friday, February 10th, 6:15 AM: We interrupt this regularly updated ed tech blog for a series of animated gifs. Consider this experiment in digital storytelling an indication that I’m thoroughly lost in the labyrinthine halls of ds106. Come back throughout the day for updates on how my animated gif "journal" is going. My morning commute of 40 miles reduced to 10 seconds of driving Friday, February 10th, 7:15 AM: While my wife is certainly not thrilled that I was taking photos while driving, I risked life and limb to explore how you can illustrate any type of mundane event with a creative use of digital media. In this case, I took 10 shots in rapid succession with the click of my phone’s camera (I had one hand on the wheel for this, and didn’t attempt to line up the shots as I was focusing more on the driving). Thanks to the GIF SHOP app, all you have to do is touch the screen to take a shot, and it’s ready to go for the next one. The magical coffee machine of plenty keeps on brewing... Friday, February 10th, 9:15 AM: Once I’m at school, it’s not long before a trip to one of the many "caffeine stations" located around the building. This morning, the tech department coffee pot had yet to be started, so I worked my way down to the central administration office’s Keurig. I wanted to produce a slightly different effect with the coffee machine this time around, hence the "rewinding" of the gif instead of simple looping. Thanks to a somewhat steady hand, and the ability to use "onion skinning" built into the GIF SHOP app, I was able to produce a much cleaner animated gif in an attempt to meet Alan Levine’s challenge to reduce the amount of movement in the piece. Still not happy, but the day is yet young! There's work to be done on the interwebz! Friday, February 10th, 10:00 AM: Although I work with teachers and students throughout the week, a large portion of my day is spent sending emails, communicating, and coordinating via the internet. Just this morning I made a test connection to a school in New York for an upcoming video conference celebrating reading month, I’ve blogged about exciting things happening in the district, read a few websites and educational articles, and "Skyped" with a couple of other people in neighboring counties about some educational collaborations. swim, fishies, swim! Friday, February 10th, 11:15 AM: I spent some time working with a 2nd grade teacher who wanted to better understand wikis and figure out how he could use them to get his students working collaboratively. He had already been blogging with them, so he had a much better grasp on the concept of a wiki than he was giving himself credit for. While waiting for him I managed to grab some shots of his fish tank with my phone propped up against his keyboard. Something excited going on at the bottom of the tank there. No, this isn't my lunch, just a tasty treat afterwards Friday, February 10th, 1:00 PM: I ate lunch with a group of teachers today, and while I’m usually comfortable doing strange things in front of people with technology (like taking a rapid succession of shots and obsessing over the lighting), I didn’t want to intrude upon the conversation with an animated gif of lunch. So instead, I created one of a Baby Ruth bar that one of the nice administrators at the later elementary building gave to me after lunch. I was able to stand my phone up so it remained stationary, allowing me to create the "magic" disappearing candy bar. I especially like the way it unwraps itself. Just a few open applications right now Friday, February 10th, 1:55 PM: I had a Skype call with TechSmith today to record a segment for The Forge, and I decided to create a short animated gif showing off all the applications I had open while talking. We talked about technology in the classroom, engaging screen casts, and more. It was a lot of fun. A clean window, is a happy window Friday, February 10th, 3:05 PM: I elected to go home bit early today as we were having a bit of freezing rain and slush, so I wanted to afford myself some extra driving time. As luck would have it, it also allowed me to participate on "This Week in ds106". The drive was pretty intense with the roads pretty slick from the slushy rain-snow, but I think the live Google Hangout show was even harder. Princess games are a favorite in our household Friday, February 10th, 7:15 PM: After a wonderful evening hanging out with the family, enjoying a home-cooked dinner, and everyone getting into their jammies (well, the kids at least), my daughter and I decided to play a little bit of Tangled Wii. I was glad for two reasons; A) I got to set my phone down and take another stationary set of shots using GIF SHOP, and B) I love playing games with my daughter. We particularly enjoy Tangled because there’s a cooperative element, where both characters can only progress as long as they help each other at certain points in the levels. A great way to finish up the evening before brushing teeth, bedtime stories, and finally, bed. I created all of these animated gifs in about 30 seconds using the very handy GIF SHOP app for iPhone, though it works just great on an iPad 2 as well.   Special thanks goes to Alan Levine for kicking off this assignment in the wee hours of the morning. If you’re a participant in ds106, or interested, you can see the assignment here.  

How often do we feel like our work will never be done in education? I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to escape the circular reasoning behind the notion that "teachers don’t have time to create their own learning resources." I believe that notion to be completely false, yet walk into any school building and you’ll easily find a good majority of teachers that claim they’re too busy to worry about "one more thing". Perhaps….but what if the reason they feel so overwhelmed is that the time they do have has been structured to be inefficient and cluttered with a lot of "small chores" that never seem to be done? This past Saturday morning I woke up to 17 inches of fresh snow. It was quite a shock, and after suiting up in my winter gear and shoveling a path to the driveway, I got the snow blower warmed up and started to clear off the driveway. It was extremely slow going, and thanks to a very narrow band of lake effect snow fall, the sticky white flakes continued to blanket the ground the entire time I was working. By the time I was halfway done with the driveway, I had to go back and re-do what I had already cleared off. I found myself slightly miffed at having to do the same work over again, and was downright annoyed when I realized that I would most likely have to come back out later in the day to clear out the end of the driveway again after the road plows came through, burying us yet again. I carried out my frosty chore though, because I knew that tackling the "big chore" would make it easier to clear off the driveway again later in the day. I could have just as easily gone back inside and waited for the snow to stop and the plows to clear the road, or even waited until the middle of this week when the weather would be warm enough to melt a lot of the snow, but that would have made things exceptionally difficult for me. Which of course is when my brain switched over into "let’s learn from this" mode (a setting that I would all too often love to be able to turn off voluntarily). 17 inches of snow at the end of my driveway. Teachers constantly prepare for the lessons of the week. Copies of handouts are made, activities are setup, trips to the computer lab are scheduled, and just about every other detail that would require some foresight is taken care of. Teachers regularly "bite off" a big chunk of tasks at the start of the work week, or before a large unit, so that they can spend more time working with students and enjoying the learning environment, rather than having to slog through the proverbial 17 inches of snow that would be menial tasks that get in the way without proper preparation. So why do many look at developing their own resources, especially those created with technology, any differently? Rather than get out there and tackle the "big chore" (creating an iMovie, making some animated GIFs, assembling some graphic organizers with a word processor), educators spend a lot of time searching for the perfect resources that may or may not exist, to fit within their units. Many use excuses of "why bother reinventing the wheel" or "it takes so much time!". Which of course to me is a bit silly. You don’t have the same students as you did last year, maybe they might need slightly tweaked resources, and if you spent some dedicated time at the start of a unit playing with a piece of technology (perhaps even alongside your students) you might discover you have a knack for a particular task (making animated GIFs to illustrate learning objectives with humor or motion). Instead, often is the case in which teachers wait until after all the learning is done, or when they have 3 hours to sit down and dedicate themselves during a professional development day. I know what I say next may not be popular, but you have to play! And you have to do it sooner than you would like or think, forcing yourself to start creating something that is yours, not just taken off the shelf (or at the very least, something you’ve taken, but have tweaked to your own purposes). I had to force myself out into the cold last Saturday morning to snow blow that driveway, even though I knew I could have waited out the snow fall; but I would have been hindered by the snow to say the least, and it would have made driving in and out of the garage difficult (to say the least). So I sacrificed time with my family and relaxing in a warm chair on a weekend morning to clear off my driveway for almost 2 hours. We may feel like our work may never be done in education, especially if we start sacrificing other opportunities to start producing our own learning resources, but what opportunities would that afford us in the future? By regularly clearing off my driveway I don’t have to worry about ice, getting my car stuck, or blocking others from visiting. By creating my own resources (even something as simple as my own writing prompts and graphic organizers), what could you allow your students to accomplish?

image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/winning-information/2314384136/ I was in the middle of leading a workshop for a group of teachers in my district yesterday when my phone started to buzz. One of my blog posts was getting hit with a lot of comments, and the emails came flying in all at once. Our lunch break was ending, so I took a quick peak and was positively mortified by what I saw. To say the comments were mean-spirited, or examples of cyberbullying, would be putting it mildly. Instead I’ll simply describe it as a few teenagers making some extremely poor decisions about how they could degrade one another in a very public and foul manner. Not having the time to deal with the matter directly, I turned to Twitter to help ferret out someone from the district in an attempt to have someone "catch" the students in the act, and help them make some better decisions. How should I handle these students from Jessamine Schools bullying one another on my blog? techsavvyed.net/archives/671#c… — Ben Rimes (@techsavvyed) February 16, 2012 Twitter answered my plea in the best way possible! @techsavvyed 1) contact principal. 2) delete comments (after #1). 3) move to moderated comments — Steve Keinath (@keinath) February 16, 2012   @techsavvyed Gotta go Hammer Time on that. Time to find an email for the principal. — Andy Losik (@mrlosik) February 16, 2012 At first, I thought I was being a bit of a narc, but after a moment of reflection, I realized it was an amazing show of assistance and support from educators across my PLN in Michigan working together to help stop some students in Kentucky from making some even worse decisions. While I began the afternoon portion of my workshop, a colleague in my district tracked down the Twitter handle for the district in which the students were commenting from, the offending comments still pouring in on my blog mind you. The person running the Twitter account for Jessamine County Public Schools stepped in to help. @techsavvyed @beckdbeck Administrators at the school have been notified.Thank you very much for the tip. — Jessamine Co Schools (@JessCoSchools) February 16, 2012   I then took the opportunity to "unapprove" the comments so I could retain the information. You see, while people like to make poor choices they aren’t always thinking as clearly as they could be. Rather than a horde of students commenting and bullying one another on my blog, it actually appeared to be just a small handful of students submitting the comments under the names of their fellow classmates in an attempt to get them into trouble. While submitting the comments, they used the same email addresses for each comment. In fact, two email addresses came up most often. I’m going to assume that the email addresses used by the culprits were in fact legitimate because after a bit of clever google searching, I discovered one of the email addresses attached to a couple of forums where teens were looking to score some "suboxone", a drug that is currently on the rise for being abused by teenagers looking to get high. I’m not sure if there’s necessarily a connection between two destructive behaviors, so I’ll just leave that point rest. The important point is that whoever left the comments on my blog most likely either used their actual email address, or was clever enough to find an email address that made it look like someone else was posting. My hope is that the student or students involved down in Jessamine were identified, because they obviously need some sort of positive attention and modeling in their lives right now. Just a few minutes after the first tweet from the school, this one came across the wire. @JessCoSchools Would love contact info for admin, thanks! — Ben Rimes (@techsavvyed) February 16, 2012   Suffice it to say, I gathered all of the pertinent evidence, and this afternoon sent it to the principal of the school along with the following email. Hello Principal Granada, As I’m sure you have been made well aware of, yesterday there was a cyberbullying incident in which at least one or more of your students made some very poor decisions in posting public comments on my blog. I wanted to sympathize with any frustration or disappointment you might be feeling. Please know that as an educator I understand that individuals make poor decisions, and I hope that you and your staff can use this as an opportunity to create a valuable learning experience for these students or student involved. I will be removing the comments from my blog post shortly, but I felt an obligation to connect with you and make sure that you had any and all information you needed to make sure that you can address this issue. I’m including the emails the students used to comment on my blog and a link to a valuable website that I’ve used in the past with students to help promote the idea of being a responsible digital citizen (http://www.digizen.org/). If you require anything else of me, please ask. -Ben Rimes www.techsavvyed.net The point I’m trying to make here is that with the help of Twitter, and a sense of "let’s get to the bottom of this" a bunch of educators dedicated to helping prevent the kind of bullying that happens inside our schools everyday were able to help identify some students several state away that are in need of some help. I certainly don’t wish for this student or students to simply be punished. I genuinely feel that someone willing to write the horrible comments that appeared on my blog yesterday, and attribute them to someone else in an attempt to blame them, needs some guidance. I hope that they get that from the staff and learning community down in Jessamine County.

Who watches the watchmen? If teachers are to be held accountable now for every single result that their students achieve on any and all testing, who makes sure that every single teacher in a school building is bringing their "A" game every single day? If it falls upon the administrators, then who is it that makes sure those principals and evaluators are able to observe every single teacher, each and every week, in order to maintain at least a semblance of consistency? If each and every state is going to hire external monitors, pay for expensive testing protocols, and report data in a near-constant stream to the public, which oversight body of elected officials or bureaucrats is going to have to spend every waking moment following through on this? If all of these measures are going to cost millions, if not billions, of dollars, where is that money coming from, and what could it be paying for in education in it’s stead? Who are the tax payers and voters that ultimately have to hold this entire process accountable, or at the very least, know enough about it so they can shut it down when it becomes far too cumbersome, inefficient, and completely irrelevant to predicting students’ success in the real world? My fear, is that nobody is watching the watchmen, and they have run amok with our schools.

I recently had the opportunity to spend a day in my old teaching position; an elementary technology class. I was always big on working with media when I taught the class for the 4 years I was in the position, so I took the opportunity to give the students a challenge taken from the pages of ds106, the wonderfully playful and media-rich digital storytelling community. The particular challenge that I gave them comes from the 4 Icon Challenge Assignment found on the ds106 site, and asks those willing to complete it to break down a story into 4 basic elements or themes, and then whittle those 4 ideas down into 4 basic icons. The students LOVED IT! I had them open up Neo Office on their school Macs, though it could just have easily have been done with Pages, MS Word, or some other word processing application. I then walked them through using the advanced Google Image Search to find images that were licensed under Creative Commons as free to use. They could have just used the regular Google Image Search, but I’m a fan of secretly embedding important skills and practices without necessarily droning on about why until after a few projects. The idea is that they’ll be in the habit of using those skills, and have a better understanding of how to use them when I introduce the concept of "why" at a later date in the year. Plus, I only had 45 minutes with each class. I created a simple 4 Icon Challenge on the fly (a simple Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), before turning them loose to create their own. I opened up the assignment a bit as well. The original guidelines called for summarizing a movie or story into four icons, whether it be setting, characters, plot devices, etc. When students asked if they could do TV shows or songs, I told them that was okay, however I did put up one HUGE disclaimer; no one was simply allowed to find images from a movie or television show and use those, as that would make the assignment far too easy. The idea is to assemble 4 rather generic looking icons in an attempt to summarize the story. I actually did that below just for you folks this evening to see if you can guess the story: 4 important elements from a popular series of books While the student didn’t necessarily use the same design aesthetic that I did (I’m going for bonus points), they did come up with a great number of 4 icon summarizes of some rather popular stories and songs. I was working on shared machines, so I couldn’t take screenshots, but I did get some cellphone snaps to share with you. If you’re feeling rather sharp this evening, see if you can guess the student created 4 icon challenges below. a popular children's fable a popular children's tv show a song all of us have heard, at least once a year I love that so many students stepped up to the challenge, and could visually assemble the summary of their stories/songs with very little help from me. Granted, there were a number of students who struggled with some of the basic mechanics of using the computers (copy, paste, dragging and dropping) but the beauty of doing something like this is that all of those students still desperately wanted to completely their 4 icon challenges even if they only one one or two images by the end of the class period. To me, that’s a huge win, because the students were practicing basic computer skills that they need to learn, and doing so in an engaging way, rather than just practicing the skills for the sake of practice. They all wanted to tell the story they had in their head, and were willing to attempt new things on the computer, many of whom repeatedly failed, but in the end all were still engaged with. Those students that finished early wanted to create more challenging summarizes, while some wanted to help those around them (with just words, mind you, not "driving" the computer for them). The students that were stuck on the mechanics were eager to continue practicing. If you wanted to attempt this summarizing strategy in your classroom I would HIGHLY recommend the following guidelines the first few times you try it: Students should choose a well known story (movie, book, fable, etc.) so no one is at a disadvantage for figuring out the summaries. Have the students focus on just one or two elements of the story (settings, characters, plot devices, events, moods, etc.) Don’t let students use the actual images to describe something. For example, when I created my Harry Potter 4 icon challenge, I found an image of a wizard’s hat, NOT Harry Potter himself Don’t worry about using technology! You can do this with pencil and paper. Once the students have it mastered, then move online so it’s easier for students to share their creations on a class website, or some other space. You’ll find that the students will quickly outgrow these guidelines, and the sky really is the limit where you take this visual summarizing strategy, as long as you focus on stories that have clear beginnings, middle, and ends (I saw students trying to do sports, and it just didn’t work well as you had to use the actual images of the game balls, fields, equipment). I could easily see teachers using this to help students at the secondary level process non-fiction passages of reading in science, history, or math. It’s worth giving it a try, and at least seeing how it could be incorporated as an option for students when taking notes, or summarizing what they’ve learned from a lesson or unit. If you try, please feel free to share, and if you guessed any of the 4 icon challenges in this post, please leave your guess in the comments! image credits from my 4 icon challenge above: "ring" - Christopher T. Howlett, from The Noun Project"mountain" - Marco Acri, from The Noun Project "eye" - John Caserta, from The Noun Project "sword" - Christopher T. Howlett, from The Noun Project

On February 11th, 2012, I woke up to 13 inches of fresh snowfall. The night before my driveway had all of half an inch of snow on it, and I was shocked to say the least! What multiplied my amazement even more was that an extremely narrow band of lake effect snow (no more than 5-10 miles across) was dumping this snow on my poor little town along Lake Michigan at an alarming rate. By the end of the event we had over 20 inches of snow on the ground. I managed to capture some of it while snow-blowing the driveway for the second time that day, and I turned it into a video story problem that I hope might be useful as a way to introduce the concept of weather or lake effect weather patterns in a science classroom. While I understand the powerful effect of Lake Michigan on my local weather, I’ve found that quite often people who aren’t from one of the Great Lake states really have a difficult time understanding just what some of the largest fresh water lakes in the world can do. I did my best to sound genuinely curious, and not provide too much misinformation or misconceptions, although I suspect you could easily use a video filled with misconceptions to get your students looking for the "right" answer to a question or two about a concept. I figured that since our rather pathetic winter weather here in Michigan this year is winding down, it might be nice to share that those of us in a tiny corner of southwest Michigan did in fact have at least one decent dumping of snow.

Of all the various ways one could weave a digital story, I’ve noticed that audio seems to be the least favorite medium of both educators and students. Video is by far the king of the digital storytelling spectrum, followed very closely by still images and text based stories. Podcasting has been around for awhile now, and while many may point to that as audio having a strong showing when it comes to digital storytelling, the majority of those podcasts seem to be radio-style narratives. What I refer to as a "red-headed step child" are often the much more complex audio only pieces that rely on sound effects, layering, and other manipulative audio techniques that require story tellers to assemble and work with a medium and skills that most likely they’ve never worked with before. For example, the Sound Effects Story Assignment on ds106 asks learners to assemble a story using only sound clips and sound effects that have no verbal communication whatsoever. In other words, paint a story using only non-spoken audio. While people might simply discount that challenge as easily accomplished by carrying a microphone with them, quite often the audio that accompanies an event doesn’t offer a clear picture of what’s happening, and doesn’t always convey the same sense of "movement" that a story typically has, with a clear beginning, middle, or end. To meet the challenge of the assignment, I assembled 5 different pieces of audio, some captured by me and some downloaded from the fantastic Free Sound Project. You can listen to my "winter walk to church" using the embedded player below. If you can’t see it, you can follow the link here to listen to my sound effect story. I had a blast putting this sound effect story together, but it was incredibly tough! Not from the standpoint of figuring out how to tell the story, but making sure all of the pieces fit together nicely. While spoken audio, or radio style digital storytelling projects are relatively easy to assemble (hence the popularity of creating podcasts), it was a challenge to make sure all of the sound effects "faded" in and out at the appropriate time to make them sound seamless. It took extra time and thought to make sure it sounded as though the worship music was in fact behind the door (playing it very softly), then ramping up the volume dramatically when the sound of the door opening occurs. For those curious, I used the following sound clips to create this sound effect story: 20 seconds of me walking in the snow - I captured this with the voice memo app on my phone, and did a silly duck walk as I crouched down trying to capture the foot steps. I then looped the audio to fill the 60 second story 10 seconds of a car driving by in the slushy road - I captured this with the voice memo app as well, then cut it down and copy and pasted it to produce the effect of multiple cars 30 seconds of my church’s contemporary worship band - again, captured with the voice memo app, then cut down to fit Snow Day 002 (Free Sound Project) - http://www.freesound.org/people/dkettle/sounds/113973/ Metal Push Door (Free Sound Project) - http://www.freesound.org/people/pagancow/sounds/15315/ My guess is that many people would be able to tell a story like this quite easily with text or video; most schools spend a great deal of time on writing, helping students develop a good sense of using "juicy" adjectives, or describing a setting or mood with detail. Capturing the story on video would be a bit more of a challenge as you would have to carefully edit the clips to assemble the story, but being able to film each "scene" or setting would be fairly easy, provided it was Winter time and you had fresh fallen snow. The audio however, was a huge challenge for me. In retrospect I could just be attributing my own experience of working outside my typical comfort zone in assembling an audio story from scratch to others in the K-12 digital storytelling community unjustly. From observations in my school district though, I rarely see teachers doing podcasting or other "audio only" projects with students, let alone attempting to create digital stories like this, using only found or created effects. Am I wrong in my assumption, or do other educators see the area of audio in the digital storytelling spectrum woefully lacking in examples beyond the "podcast" format?