I have added a new visual to the “Skill Set” of ” It’s not about the Tools, it’s about the Skills“.

Digital Storytelling Skills

Digital Storytelling Skills

Many times, I see eyes glazing over, when I excitedly speak with parents or administrators about blogging, skyping or podcasting with students. Many of them, unfamiliar with the tools, will immediately feel uncomfortable. Some will automatically and immediately steer the conversation back to what they know:

What about learning the basics, like reading, writing, math and science?

I usually try to explain and emphasize, that these skills are precisely what are being taught. We are not podcasting in order to teach Audacity nor Garageband. We are not recording students for the fun of using microphone, we are not blogging, so we can practice typing, we are not skyping for the purpose of using a webcam.

Parents and administrators, unfamiliar with the tools, also seem worried that “important” academic time is being lost and wasted!

In an attempt to explain that there is so much more involved when using technology tools, I blogged a few months ago, We Podcasted Today So, did you learn anything?

It is important that we explain to parents and administrators that we are using the tools to practice the above mentioned basic literacy skills, engage and motivate students, but also address, integrate and embed so many more skills and literacies.

Take a look at the visuals below:

• Podcasting Skill
• Video Conferencing Skills
• Blogging Skills
• Wiki Skills
• Digital Storytelling

What are some other technology tools you are using in the classroom? What are the skills and literacies that you are addressing? How can we educate parents and administrators that blogging, podcasting and skyping, etc. are simply a vehicle to preparing students for many skills and literacies, including the 3Rs they are accustomed to and familiar with.

Disclaimer:

All images were created by me with photographs obtained at Stockxchnge. The resulting visuals are available for you to use, remix and build upon under the Creative Commons license. This means, that you are free to copy, embed, print, or distribute the images as long as it is not for commercial purposes and you give credit to me, as the original creator.

This work by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

You might want to grab the images with higher resolution from their Flickr Page:

• Podcasting Skills
• Blogging Skills
• Video Conferencing Skills
• Wiki Skills
• Digital Storytelling Skills

Podcasting Skills

Video Conferencing Skills

Blogging Skills

Wiki Skills

Digital Storytelling Skills

One of our first grade classes read the book Flat Stanley by Jim Brown. They sent paper Flat Stanleys to relatives and friends around the country and received images and stories back.

Paper Flat Stanley

Then, inspired by the “worldwide” success” of the “other first grade class’” podcast episode of the Magic Tree House, the six year olds wanted to create their own recording.

As a class their brainstormed with their teacher a storyline so every one of them could have a segment in the recording. It came natural to them that they wanted to be flattened by their SmartBoard and be mailed around the world.

As their homework assignment, they were to pick a location of their choosing and to borrow a book from the library about that location. They could also use the internet to research their destination. Together with their parents they read the book and wrote a short script that needed to include:

• The location (City, State, Country, and/or Continent)
• How did they get there (transportation)?
• What did they do at that location?
• How did they get back home?

They were also given the reminder that

This is an audio recording, so the children need to think about the senses and sound effects they can use to help portray the mood. How did it feel to be mailed? how did it sound and smell at the places. What did they see?

Recording with Garageband

Take a listen and follow these first graders to London (England), Antarctica, Alabama (USA), Space, Israel, Tokyo (Japan), North Pole, Illinois (USA), New York (USA), Hollywood (USA) and Michigan (USA).

Please take the time to let these six year olds know where you are from by leaving a comment. Having a worldwide audience does matter!

My 5 year old niece lives in Brazil. I don’t get to see her much… Over this winter break, I was able to share some precious time with her though Skype. I read her several stories as I was showing the accompanying illustrations to her through the webcam. She also read to me in her first attempts.

In order to share some more storytime with her, I recorded a fairy tale, my grandmother used to tell my brother and me when we were children. I found a translation online from the original German story “Der Wolf und die sieben Geisslein” from the Brother Grimm (“The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats”) into Spanish “El lobo y las siete Cabritas”, which is my niece’s first language.

Hopefully, my brother will be able to download the MP3 file and transfer it onto an iPod, so I can continue telling my niece fairy tales and a family tradition can continue through time, space and language barriers.

The Wold and the Seven Little Goats

Right Click and Save Link as to download MP3 file. El Lobo y las Siete Cabritas

The Year: 2010

The Challenge: Take one photograph every day for 365 days.

Display them on my 365/2010 Challenge blog and on my Flickr 365/2010 set.

Joined the EdTech 365/2010 Flickr Group

Purpose: Digital storytelling through photo blogging and to grow as a photographer

Equipment: iPhone and Canon Rebel XS

If you are participating yourself in a 365 Photo Challenge, leave a link to your Flickr set or photo blog to be added to the link list.

Cross posted on TechLearning Advisor Blog
Podcasting has been around for a while now. It has also made it’s entry into the world of schools. Teachers of younger students are venturing into the world of digital storytelling in the classroom and are recording their students digitally.

The benefits for students to practice skills such as the following are part of a growing list.

• listening
• speaking
• presenting
• comprehension
• storytelling
• performance
• voice acting
• oral fluency
• media
• technology

I believe that there is an added bonus, one that we are just beginning to explore with the younger crowd is the benefit of a having a worldwide audience. The process of creating and recording a podcast is only one part of it. The opportunity to having their work disseminate on a bigger scale is just starting to be possible as teachers are growing and expanding their PLN (Personal Learning Network).  This network can literally span the world through social network sites such as blogs, Nings and twitter.

I am curious to find out if having a global audience makes a difference to six year olds or not?

Does having a Global Audience make a difference?

Once our podcast MP3 file was created, I embedded the file into a blog post on Langwitches and sent an announcement on my Twitter network with the invitation to listen to the audio and leave a comment with their geographic location.

Over the weekend, comments with observations, encouragement, and commendation were pouring in. I tracked the location of the commenters on a Google Map.

The following school day, students were sitting at their desks listening eagerly to me read the comments for them. In addition I showed them the location on the map. I made it a point to remind them that “their” voices were traveling and reaching to far away places.

There were comments from:

• USA
• Argentina
• Scotland
• England
• Spain
• Germany
• Turkey
• China
• India
• Bangladesh
• Thailand
• Australia
• New Zealand

There were a few words that students immediately picked up on and were thrilled to hear over and over again in several comments. They were especially intrigued by the word “professional”. Proud giggles were heard when commenters told them they sounded like 4th or 5th graders and that college professors would let their student teachers listen to their voices as an example. They would be teaching others who were much older than themselves.

Andrea Hernandez from EdtechWorkshop suggested to create a Wordle from all the comments that were left on the blog. As always I am amazed how a word cloud can shed light in an instant on a “bunch of text”.

Wordle created from comments left by listeners of 1st Grade podcast

As we were reading the comments, we also talked about and noted differences among our commenters. Not only where they were coming from, but also if we could figure out, if they were male/female, teachers/parents/grandparents or elementary school level, middle school or at the university level.

During the day, as I met these first graders at different times in the hallway of the school, I was asked as they were passing by, if someone else had listened to”their” voices and where they were from.

At the end of the day, the same first graders were part of a Skype call with another first grade class from  North Carolina. When I asked them, if they had any questions to ask our Skype partners, immediately a hand shot up wanting to know: “if the teacher and the students from North Carolina were “fans” of ours and had listened to our podcast?” Since, the class in North Carolina had not heard it, we immediately sent the blog link to them to check it out.

Here are quotes from journal entries of these podcasting six year olds (Word for word, I only took the liberty and used spell check before posting )

When I heard those compliments, it made me feel happy and very excited. I loved hearing those compliments.

When I heard about the replies, I felt great. Just amazing, so good. They said so much good words. I loved it very much.

I was very happy when I heard them. I liked all the comments about Jack and Annie.

When people texted us, I felt so happy and surprised. I t was fun when I heard one text that they were a big fan.

My class did a very great podcast. People all over earth made us happy. They were nice to us. Yes, they were!

So so so so so so so so soooooooo great! And I liked it so much that I want to explode like a volcano.

When I saw the Wordle, I felt really unbelievable. It was cool!

I felt very happy when I heard they thought we did great. I did not feel sad, I felt excited.

It was fun making a podcast. When we made a podcast, it was good. When they sent us stuff, it was fun.

I felt proud of myself because we got so many comments. I liked them all, because they make me happy because they are very kind and nice.

So, what do you think? Does it matter to a six year old to have a worldwide audience? Does an audience beyond his/her teacher and parents influence student’s motivation and excitement for learning reading, writing, speaking and listening skills?

If you have not thought of podcasting with your younger elementary school students, I encourage you to think again.

The first graders at my school had listened to the second grade podcast about animals, and had really enjoyed their story.They were especially thrilled that the second graders had received so many comments from teachers around the world. Believe it or not, but having an audience matters… even to 6 year olds.

They were enthusiastic and eager to record their own voices to get them “into other people’s computers and iPods” too.

I had started reading a chapter book called Vacation under the Volcano by Mary Pope Osborne from the Magic Tree House series with them.

The idea was to pretend that we were interviewing Jack and Annie, the two main characters, about their latest adventure that had taken them to Pompeii.

We read one chapter at a time and discussed as a class,  what happened as we were reading. After each   reading, I typed up all the questions and answers that students had came up with. The following time I went to their classroom, we recorded these questions and answers from the “script”.

I rotated all students to be either the interviewer, Jack (boys) and Annie (girls). I also had them record several segments as a class chant together (ex. gasping, “no children allowed”), which they seemed to enjoy very much.

Recording with Garageband

I had several students at a time come to the back of the class and record directly into Garageband, while the other students were silently working on classroom work or reading a book. A few times, I also took them out into the hallway, if the teacher had another activity planned in the classroom.

• I was amazed how cooperative and attentive to what was going on with the recording in the back of the room while it was not their turn.
• Several students started to take a real interest in the editing part of the podcast too. They were verifying that I was editing out any clicking noises that were included when I stopped the recording segment, or if a word was repeated twice.
• If they were not happy with their recording, they asked to record over it for a second, third or fourth time.
• Shy and quiet students were coming out of their shell. Their classmates were surprised and impressed of these new “podcast” voices they were hearing from them.

Recording in the Hallway

Recording:

• After demonstrating the difference in the sound of their voices and fluency, students agreed to NOT read off the script.
• I read one sentence at a time to the student who was to record. I let them practice saying the sentence out loud and coached them with their volume, melody and to use different acting voices.
• Some students needed to have sentences split into parts. Putting each sentence back together made it sound seamless in the recording.
• I could tell a drastic improvement among students in their confidence level and voice expression as we progressed in the book.

After class,

• I “cleaned” the recording tracks
• added music and  sound effects

The class couldn’t wait to hear the entire recording the next day. They wanted to hear the audio from start to finish, including the newest chapter clips. They begged to hear it again and again from the beginning and not only the added part. By the time we reached the end of the book they had heard the podcast over 20 times.

Skills addressed:

• listening
• speaking
• presenting
• comprehension
• storytelling
• performance
• voice acting
• oral fluency
• media
• technology

Take a “listen” and leave a comment to these first graders who worked very hard and enthusiastically on their recording. Let them know where you are from too. We will create a google map with placemarks to show how far their voices reached.

Thank you for leaving our first graders comments. You are making a worldwide audience real for them and are keeping them motivated. We are tracking them on our Google Map. Once you leave a comment with your location, we will add you to our Google Map.

View MJGDS- 1st Grade Podcast: Magic Tree House in a larger map

Using visuals to create and support stories is a skill we should encourage and nurture in our students . It should be obvious by now that I consider storytelling an integral part of a teacher’s toolbox. You can read about the Need for Storytelling and Why Storytelling Can/Should Be Anywhere/Everywhere and will understand why storytelling can fulfill many roles in the learning process.

Storytelling:

• helps us pass on knowledge
• connects the overwhelming flow of information,  so our brains can digest and remember it better
• uses a format that students of today are familiar and comfortable with

Now add visuals to the mix…

According to Wikipedia, Visual literacy is

the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from information presented in the form of an image. Visual literacy is based on the idea that pictures can be “read” and that meaning can be communicated through a process of reading.

It is hard sometimes to make/find images available to your students (especially for the younger ones) that they can use in their digital storytelling projects or for creative writing. I am always hesitant to let them loose on Google or Flickr to find their own images, because of copyright issues, but also inappropriate content.

I wanted to share a Flickr set of the Travel Bear from Argentina, China, Egypt, Costa Rica, Peru and Italy. There are all in one place and licensed under Creative Commons to share and use with your students.

In the past, students have made up stories with images from the bear for younger students by using PhotoStory

Students could choose different images from the set to create whole new stories made up by them. Sixth graders created short movies for their first grade buddies.
Andrea Hernandez from edtechworkshop encouraged her first graders to choose an image from the Travel Bear’s Italy Blog, download the image into Pixie (or you could use KidPix or TuxPaint ) and the six year olds wrote a postcard style letter to Jose, the bear.

Here is a slideshow of images available from the travel bear around the world. I would love to hear what kind of creative writing projects you have come up with by encouraging your students to use creative commons images from the web? Please share…

Mrs. Z’s 4th & 5th grade math class read the book “The Math Curse” by Jon Scieszka and illustrated by Lane Smith.

The plot summary of the book from Wikipedia describes it nicely:

The book, which is told by a nameless female student, begins with a seemingly innocent statement by her math teacher- “you know, almost everything in life can be considered a math problem.” The next morning, the heroine finds herself thinking of the time she needs to get up along the lines of algebra. Next comes the mathematical school of probability, followed by charts and statistics. As the narrator slowly turns into a “math zombie”, everything in her life is transformed into a problem. A class treat of cupcakes becomes a study in fractions, while a trip to the store turns into a problem of money. Finally, she is left painstakingly calculating how many minutes of “math madness” will be in her life now that she is a “mathematical lunatic.”

Inspired by the story, the students looked around our school and started seeing that math indeed is all around us. In groups, they worked on a storyline to create their own “Math Curse” episodes.

I had shown them previously a video from the Common Craft Show “Wikis in Plain English” and we decided to base the math episodes on their type of explanations and filming style.

Students:

1. Spent time brainstorming their stories
2. Decided on a math problem they wanted to demonstrate and solve
3. Created props and drawings
4. Wrote a script
5. Practiced their skit
6. Directed their own episode

We recorded their episodes with a flip camera and put them together with iMovie.

Second graders at my school are studying animals in their science unit. They learned about the different characteristics of mammals, reptiles and birds.

If their parents ask them tonight at the dinner table if they learned anything today, the students probably will tell them that they recorded a podcast today!

Will the parents know that they practiced:

• Collaboration skills : working in groups on different segments of the podcast, tying in and back to a story that was developed by the entire class.
• Writing skills: creative & descriptive writing, sequencing, editing and revising scripts
• Speaking skills: speaking slowly, fluently, clearly and with expression in their voices
• Presentations skills: being able to express themselves orally
• Communication skills: being able to convey and teach information to others (not only in their physical location and presence, but also in virtual time and from places around the world.
• Oral fluency: increase awareness of their voice, speed and its rhythm.
• Auditory skills: practice listening skills, address auditory learning styles
• (Digital) storytelling skills: being able to weave information and facts preciously learned into a creative story, form a “relationship” with the content presented, entertain others through creative narrative.
• Media literacy: different types of podcasts (narrative, informational, storytelling, conversational, collaborative, interview style, etc), understanding different components of a podcast episode, being able to express themselves in different media.
• Information literacy: integrating, expressing and transmitting information in a variety of media.
• Technology skills: exposure to sound editing software, such as Garageband

Their teacher and I had planned to produce a podcast episode integrating the learning of that science unit. As a class, they brainstormed and decided on a storyline for their podcast. Then they were divided into 4 groups:

1. Narrators
2. Mammals
3. Reptiles
4. Birds.

We listened to several podcast examples, I created in previous years with other elementary school students.

Each group worked together to write a script that would collaboratively make up the class’ podcast episode.

They were allowed to be as creative as they wanted to be within the parameters set by their teachers and the storyline the class had decided on:

• Each segment could not be longer than 3 minutes long
• Each group (except narrators) decided on a particular animal within their animal group
• They had to integrate the characteristics of the animal by taking on the role of that animal
• Their script had to includ:
  • characteristics of themselves
  • as many vocabulary and descriptive words as possible

After they wrote and rehearsed their script we started recording. Paying special attention to:

• Is there interest and enthusiasm in their voices?
• Is there learning in their voices?
• Is there pride in what they are accomplishing in their voices?

Observations:

• Some groups worked better together than others. Collaboration skills are as important than ever in the classrooms. In this particular case of working on the script (pre-recording stage), technology tools and skills HAVE NOTHING to do with learning how to work together.
• As we were working on recording individual groups’ segments, not necessarily in order as they were going to appear in the final podcast, students excitement grew and we heard “I can’t WAIT to hear it” over and over again.
• Several students did not like the way their voice sounded and asked to re-record their part.
• There was definitely learning going on as the “weaker” students listened in to the “recording” voices of some “stronger” students. They copied their intonation and “acting” voices.
• Some students struggled reading their part from the script. I asked them to split their part up into shorter segments and “speak” it, instead of reading it. Once each shorter segment was recorded and we listened to all their segments, we could compare the sound of their voice (fluency) to the one that they had “read” off the paper. What a noticeable difference for everyone to hear.
• While recording individual group segments, other groups were getting impatient and antsy in their seats. Although important to allow them to learn from the recording process of others, I would have them work on other components in the future. Ex. illustrate their podcast story, typing their script, etc.

Check out some other posts I have written about podcasting in the past:

• Producing a Podcast
• Reflections of Podcast Project
• Podcasting with 3rd Grade

Listen to the podcast of our second graders.

Leave students feedback here in the comment section. Let them know too where in the world you are from. Comments will surely will be appreciated and be motivating for future podcast episodes by this group. These students worked hard!