Fun With Technology Integration in Schools

Summary: The speakers Kevin Hodgson and Bonnie Kaplan talked about the ways to integrate technology in the form of digital story telling.  They talked about what it means to create a digital story and what techniques one need to adapt into a collaborative story telling project.  They sent out word saying that they are interested in developing a digital ABC book project and asked if anyone was interested.  They had a good response from several people around the world.  Everyone was given a couple of random letters which were linked to their real life experiences and wrote a little paragraph describing the letter in a digital form which will not extend more than two minutes.  They received different themes with different accents representing different hometown settings. After all the stories were dropped in the digital box they had to spend a lot of time in sorting out the themes and figuring out different ways to connect these stories to blend together as one collaborative story.  They made the whole thing into four little stories and one big story.  They embedded videos into each story to support the theme.   The speakers used blog as their launching space for sharing all these short stories.  They also used Cycle Jump Cut as their editing tool.  This part of the project had its own limitations and frustrations.  Since it was an online project they had no chance of meeting the participants personally.  They tried to connect with them and kept in touch through the blog posts and video conferencing to understand the ideas and the opinions of their participants.Everyone’s goal here was to complete the project successfully and informatively.  The speakers concluded their speech by saying that the technology is the new frontier of the modern world.  It is the essence of the 21^st century which is ever changing. 

My Ideas:  Doing this kind of a project takes up a lot of time.  I am not sure how feasible this is to do between the schools across the world.  It needs a lot of organization and co ordination on the organizers side.  However, if this is a class project or even a grade level project we can overcome several hurdles mentioned by the speakers.  It can even be extended between two classes from different schools.  The teacher needs to know how much work is involved in this and be mentally ready to face the challenge.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS