Make Me a Story
Teaching Writing Through Digital Storytelling

Make Me a Story

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“Just as writing can be a process of discovery, so can digital storytelling, where images, words, and music all work together to create meaning.” — Lisa Miller

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Excerpt of contents

Introduction
Chapter 1: Stories That Matter
Chapter 2: How Do Writers Tell (Digital) Stories?
Chapter 3: Taking Students Through the Writing Process, Part 1
Chapter 4: Taking Students Through the Writing Process, Part 2
Chapter 5: Learning Through Digital Storytelling: Standards and Assessment

About the author

Lisa C. Miller is an associate professor of journalism at the University of New Hampshire and has worked on digital stories with elementary school teachers and students.

Review of “Moodle 1.9 English Teacher’s Cookbook”

The great thing about “recipe” books like the  Moodle 1.9 English Teacher’s Cookbook is that they spark off ideas in you and motivate you to  try them out with your own classes. I found that here from the very first chapter: suggested activities flow fast and freely from one page to the next, enthusing you with the desire to go off and personalise them. The author, Silvina P Hillar is an  English teacher with a passion for technology and her technical reviewer,  PHM Ben Reynolds is an award-winning fictionist and teacher of Writing. A lot of expertise has gone into tailoring the activities to the English classroom. You can read a breakdown of all the chapters here, but I’ll take them one at a time…

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Some advice for authors on self-publishing and ebooks — from teleread.com

and

New vanity publishing? — from publishingguru.blogspot.com

It’s a pretty good system for everyone involved in the making of a best-seller. Efficiency, ease of promotion, a pre-determined outcome, and everyone gets paid, even though about half of those hardcovers will eventually be composted, too. If you can publish a best-seller, you’d be crazy to publish anything else.

If you are at the bottom end of the mid-list scale, you’d be crazy to give your book license away at current industry standards. Let’s examine the three publisher advantages in light of the modern digital/print-on-demand landscape.

In Education Journal

Some examples:

Systemic Changes in Higher Education
Author(s): George Siemens | Kathleen Matheos

A power shift is occurring in higher education, driven by two trends: (a) the increased freedom of learners to access, create, and re-create content; and (b) the opportunity for learners to interact with each other outside of a mediating agent. Information access and dialogue, previously under control of the educator, can now be readily fulfilled by learners. When the essential mandate of universities is buffeted by global, social/political, technological, and educational change pressures, questions about the future of universities become prominent. The integrated university faces numerous challenges, including a decoupling of research and teaching functions. Do we still need physical classrooms? Are courses effective when information is fluid across disciplines and subject to continual changes? What value does a university provide society when educational resources and processes are open and transparent?

The Net Generation’s Informal and Educational Use of New Technologies
Author: Swapna Kumar

Harnessing New Technologies to Teach Academic Writing to the Net Generation
Author(s): Sean Wiebe | Sandy McAuley

Abstract:
While the ubiquity of Web 2.0 technologies disrupts conventional notions of schooling and literacy, its impact on learning is idiosyncratic at best. Taking the form of a dialogue based on the fifteen-week collaboration of two colleagues implementing an innovative first-year university writing course, this paper documents some of the successes and challenges they faced as they sought to create a space for those technologies in their classrooms.

Zooburst — from eduTecher

ZooBurst is a digital storytelling tool that is designed to let anyone easily create their own customized 3D pop-up books. This is a wonderful way to practice and teach writing as well and it is incredibly cool as well. All you need is a web cam to turn on the augmented reality features that are really awesome. A great site for young writers.

zooburst.com

Final Version of Common Standards Unveiled — from EdWeek.org by Catherine Gewertz

The final set of common academic standards was released today, capping months of closed-door work to write them and months more to revise them with feedback from state education officials, teachers’ unions, and other education interest groups.

The project is an attempt to address the uneven patchwork of standards that results in differing expectations among schools, districts, and states and leaves many students unprepared for work or college.

Organizers of the Common Core State Standards Initiative scheduled a press event at a Georgia high school for this morning and invited a high-profile list of guests, including governors and education commissioners, to speak in support of the standards.

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It’s all Latin to me: Latin abbreviations in scholarly writing — APA Style blog by Chelsea Lee

Also:

You can download a PDF of the Latin abbreviations table here if you would like to use it as a handout for teaching or classroom purposes.

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Ira Glass on the building blocks of storytelling — from Common Craft

Quote from Lee LeFever:

We’re big fans of Ira Glass and the This American Life radio show/podcast.  We listen to every show on the podcast and there are few broadcast storytellers that I respect more.  Via an older post on the Explainist blog, I found these videos of him describing the process of researching and crafting stories from back in 2006.  He names two building blocks of storytelling and how they work together. Really great perspectives that you can hear in every story he tells.

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New blog: The Literary Platform

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Channel4Learning.com

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===================================
WRITING IN (AND ABOUT) THE FUTURE
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The journal-turned-magazine CREATIVE NONFICTION celebrated its
transformation by organizing a one-day symposium, held at the Writer’s
Center in Bethesda, Maryland, focused on how writing, reading, and
publishing may be transformed in the decade ahead.

On the program were two futurists: Jay Ogilvy, co-founder of the Global
Business Network, who described the usefulness of scenario thinking for
weighing both optimistic and pessimistic visions of the future, and Dan
Sarewitz, director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes
at Arizona State University, who warned of the unexpected consequences
of human enhancement that many enthusiasts are hailing as a golden age
of prosperity, pointing out that the greatest example of that
enhancement is the soldier.

The bulk of the conference focused on how writers fit into this future,
a time when people may be reading fewer books but communicating with
one another and, yes, reading via a wider variety of platforms–e.g.,
blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and the multimedia digital Vook (video book)
described by Jack Sallay, the company’s vice president of marketing.

Writers of the future will bear more of the responsibility of reaching
their audiences, as publishers’ economic models become less supportive
of traditional functions like marketing and promotion, many of the
symposium participants argued. The good news is that there are more
innovative new ways of doing-it-yourself, like building a community of
supporters around an author’s blog.

As long as the written word is still valued (whether it is ultimately
read, viewed, or listened to by the audience), writing has a future.

DETAILS: CREATIVE NONFICTION, http://www.creativenonfiction.org
The Writer’s Center, http://www.writer.org

PHOTOS FROM THE CONFERENCE:
http://www.wfs.org/April-May2010/Update/photos.htm

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Career readiness: Don’t expect too much from colleges — from educationnext.org by Mark Bauerlein

A few weeks ago, Hart Research Associates released a report entitled “Raising the Bar: Employers’ Views on College Learning in the Wake of the Economic Downturn.” The report listed the findings of a survey of 302 employers whose firms have 25+ employees, with at least one-fourth of new hires possessing a two-year or four-year college degree. It was commissioned by the Association of American Colleges & Universities, apparently to determine how well post-secondary school curricula match up with workplace demands.

One of the broadest indicators: “Only one in four employers thinks that two-year and four-year colleges are doing a good job in preparing students for the challenges of a global economy.”

Interestingly, employers didn’t endorse a training-oriented kind of preparation. They preferred “a blend of liberal and applied learning.” Indeed, they emphasized not only skills and knowledge tailored to a specific field, but also “a broad range of skills and knowledge.” (emphasis DSC)

Because of the focus on the “global economy,” on the actual conditions of the downturn and the “more complex” realities of our hyper-connected world, the report speaks of “active learning,” “real-world settings,” “cultural and ethnic diversity,” “the challenges of today’s global economy,” “ethical decision-making,” and “emerging educational practices.” These ideas and terms are common enough in education circles. (emphasis DSC)

From DSC:
I post this with hesitation, as I don’t see parents — or students who are funding their own educations these days — having the luxury to take such a viewpoint.  At the price of $100,000+ for 4 years, can someone not expect a serious ROI that involves being able to (at least in some substantial part) “hit the ground running”?

On another note, I suppose Mark’s right to say that the earlier students learn how to write well the better (and he emphasizes the importance of the middle and high school years).  However, that doesn’t seem to be happening in many cases.  Hmmm….no easy answers here…as he mentions, learning how to write is a labor-intensive process.

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From DSC:
If you want to use your voice (vs. your fingers) to leave comments within a Word document,
you can do so by following these steps.

   

Adding audio-based comments to a Word document


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Storybird.com -- collaborative storytelling

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Student-provided sites from The Teaching & Learning Digital Studio at Calvin College

Student-provided sites from The Teaching & Learning Digital Studio at Calvin College

Digital Studio Sites is a blog with a large collection links from the Teaching & Learning Digital Studio Staff at Calvin College (Grand Rapids, MI) that covers a wide range of academic topics and more. The staff scours the Web for the best, most interesting, and useful Web sites for the classroom (and maybe beyond) on the Internet and continually updates the list of links. Professors can quickly find sites related to their field of study by keyword, search, or by subscribing via RSS feed.

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