Thing 6: Digital Storytelling

While I do a lot of media creation and digital storytelling with students, this is an ever changing and growing arena of technology tools, so I always welcome an opportunity to explore new options and dig deeper into the creation capacity of familiar tools.  For this assignment I focused on the solutions for student creation being rolled out in Adobe Spark, and creating within Powtoons. 
This week I rolled out a project in a Spanish 7 class in which students were asked to create Travel Videos to entice tourists to various Spanish speaking countries using the five senses.  The teacher had used Adobe Spark in the past, but at that time the regulations within the program meant she had to allow students access to her account for them to create, because most of the 7th graders were still 12 years old.  Recently Adobe Spark created an Education option, allowing schools to connect their student Google accounts, which solves that student access challenge.  I worked with my tech department to make this connection possible and the rollout to students went very smoothly.  They are in the creation phase now, and will be heavily relying on the resources I provide through my
Media Creation Tools document.  This is a document that I leave intentionally varied and broad to allow for maximum student empowerment of tool selection in their learning process.
In addition to Adobe Spark, I used Powtoons to create a promotional video for our April Literacy program of Bookopoly.  This is a tool that I have used in the past, but I usually suggest it for a certain style of video and I wanted to explore how versatile it could be.  Creating this video gave me a small glimpse into the potential for creativity and opened up other projects that I do to potentially using Powtoons. 

Thing 20: Social Reading

I recently began the ISTE Certification process and one of our initial assignments had us crowdsourcing for resources to address diverse learning needs.   As I began this assignment for Crowdsourcing of Diverse Learning Resources I knew there were several ways that I could approach it.  I decided to specifically focus on diversity in a cultural sense, as it is something that I have been exploring through my role both in the library and the purchase of books and as a member of our Diversity Committee at Lake George.  This fits nicely with the ISTE Collaborator strand which explicitly develops "cultural competency when communicating with students, parents and colleagues", as well as inspiring me to utilize some of the tools I have been exploring for social reading.

With all of the new tools out there I have been wanting to utilize some of the curation elements to connect to our reading culture.  I gathered titles to curate for student access that would reflect the theme of cultural diversity.  I used two methods of curation, with Destiny Collections and Sora, creating two points of access for students to explore diverse titles.  This will allow them to be empowered and self-directed in their selection of books to expand their cultural understanding and experiences.  The curation of these titles is a step in our process of developing cultural competency within our school community.  The tools I explored provide a natural access point for students.  These are resources and tools I will use again for collaboration and curation.  Now that I have learned the process and potential I look forward to seeing the student engagement.

My next steps are to increase the activity of our avid readers on Goodreads.  I have a handful of students who use it to write and share reviews as well as keep track of their reading lives.  This has been a great method of collaboration and communication with them, but I want to spread that usage.  Right now I am working with a small group of readers participating in a Battle of the Books reunion, and see the potential of getting them connected in that way.