Looking to extend education beyond the walls of the school? Want to make a difference rather than creating another standards based assignment that has no relevance or long term meaning? Tired of setting up contrived projects and being responsible for every moment of learning in your classrooms? Ready to put your students to work to make a change in their community? Go directly to Challenge Based Learning! This bold approach pioneered by a national group of educators, with support from the innovative education team within Apple, is built on the foundation ACOT2 and Project Based Learning creating an education model that can fundamentally change the business of education. Take Action and Make a Difference.
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In the quest to grab the attention of a digital generation and prepare them to be entrepreneurs and social activists we need a new set of tools. The stand and deliver, memorization, trivial pursuit, drill and kill, test driven, standards based approach to education will not lead to the creative generation that our future depends on. Time to think different, break the mold, think out of the box. Another semester has been put into the books, and I wonder how much was really learned in schools across the country, and if there was learning was it meaningful and lasting. I am amazed at how much I do not remember about my schooling, and I had a lot of schooling. Every year more and more of the details fade and I am less able to remember all of those facts and figures I worked so hard to memorize. Two years of Latin – gone. Two years of Greek – really gone. How to diagram a sentence – are you kidding. What I do remember are the larger themes and stories. I remember the environmental and self reliance lessons my grandmother taught me while touring the mountains of Colorado. I remember the power of family and the tragedy of policy from the stories I experienced on the rez. I remember the stories of incredible resilience of the students I worked with in a boarding school in the mountains of Southern California. So, how can we bring the power of story to the day to day learning in schools. How much in the standards really needs to be learned – does it really lead to success? Or should we build the curriculum around powerful stories and focus on the larger themes of life rather than memorizing the nits. What do you think? It is all about the story. If there is only one thing you walk away from this site with, that would be the one. Digital technology is great for enhancing and distributing the story but it can not replace a good story. Jason Ohler uses the analogy of a bad guitar player with an even larger amplifier and speakers. It is still bad, just louder. We see a lot of this with powerpoint presentations,the tool has actually made bad presentations worse. And made bad presentors out of a lot of people. The good news for educators is that digital storytelling is really about good writing – which is easily defensible in this day and age of standards. The frosting on the cake is that being able to create and distribute movies is exciting to students. So if we are sneaky enough we can actually make writing engaging to many students who are adverse to academic work. I am slowly moving the content over from the old site and adding content from a digital storytelling course I have taught for several years both online and face to face. All the content should be available by the end of the week. If you are looking for something in particular or have some recommendations for what content you would like to see let me know. This will be the format for the digital storytelling content: Storytelling • What is a story? • Components • What is a Telling? I will also be adding content from a great project I participated in this past year on Challenge Based Learning.
I love Halloween and my kids think I am crazy. I spend nights and weekends for weeks setting up our front yard and creating a haunted house in the back. I drag them into the work and the fun sometimes kicking and screaming. Why this fixation with Halloween? Because it is all about stories. Stories from my youth, some scary and some happy, flood back each October. The stories are full of sites, sounds and smells. The stories are so rich that I can smell the fall leaves on the ground, and a chill in the air, even though I livein Arizona where the grass is green and the temperature is not very chilly. The stories that flood back have simple but powerful messages – being scared brings out a new appreciation of life, friendship is fertile ground for stories and memories, when in possession of a hefty garbage bag of candy moderation is a good virtue, if a dog is chasing you candy is not very important . . . As I pack away my webs, skeletons and body parts the depression sets in but it is tempered by the rich stories that will be with me forever. Next year will be even better . . . |
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