Helen Barrett is sharing her commitment to life-long portfolios and building the argument for portfolios in our own personal lives, not just for our students.

• Recommended book: The Power of Portfolios by Elizabeth Hebert - Aimed at elementary level.
• Link to Helen’s PowerPoint for session.

Realizing I had my camera with me, I logged onto UStream.tv.com and recorded Helen’s session.

Ernest Morrell is opening the session with 4 discussion questions:

• What will be demanded of students in terms of literacy in the 21st century
• In what ways is the nature of literacy changing?
• How should the discipline of English change in response to the changes in literacy?
• What are the ways that your students practice literacy when they are not in class?
  • filmmaking
  • video games
  • virtual worlds - adopting different identities

Issues:

• “Historical Memory” - Important to teach students that once they post something, it’s there forever
• Very complicated now to figure out what is reliable information
• Switching from the “you need to learn to do this by yourself” to “you need to learn to do this collaboratively.”

Dynamic, challenging time for teaching English and literacy - and meeting increased literacy demands. Teaching 21st century literacies can help us to address many of these challenges while providing opportunities for youth to produce socially and academically powerful texts in ways that were not previously possible - democratizing access to literacy.

Big Question: Motivating students - Expectancy Value Theory of Motivation - 1) Motivation is measure of how confident you are in your ability to perform a task and 2) motivation is measure of how relevant the task is to you. Value + Expectancy = Motivation

Examples:

Elementary Students: Teatro- Theater of the Oppressed (Pablo Freire)- Education for humanity’s sake. Elementary students out of Watts neighborhood of L.A. doing tableau on violence in their neighborhoods. Actors (students) then invite audience in to dialogue. Students were producing both academic text and socially relevant text.

11th Grader English Students - Great Gatsby unit on critical media literacy & the American Dream. Students analyzing images in 50 Cent and Seventeen and learning to read images. Between the gangster image and glamour image, teens die due to inability to read the media. Critical media literacy is a citizenship skill! The American Dream tied to wealth, not citizenship. Assignment = counter media campaign (e.g., female athletes, tough guy tutoring younger students) If you don’t like the media, make a new media - that’s the difference with 21st century literacy. Students must learn to de-construct images - and to create their own.

Critical media production: documentary filmmaking - (www.tcla.gseis.ucla.edu) - Students documenting cultures of their communities. Link between academic literacy and documentary filmmaking. Students become experts on their topics. Requires a high level of literacy to produce a documentary.

Teaching film and television:

• Watching a film in English/Language Arts class (The Odyssey/Godfather example). Using an epic text that talks about ideology of western civilization. Students use analysis of film to inform their analysis of text. Looking at camera angles to “privilege” certain characters. Having students write essays around popular culture.
• Spoken word and hip-hop in the English classroom - If young people are engaged with it, it’s important to talk about. Hip-hop reflects problems we have in society. It’s one of the few youth-created popular cultural forms. Involves complex uses of language and literacy. The Poet in Society Unit - poetry is cool again. But everything we do is mediated by the poetry of our time. Think of T.S. Elliot as a social activist, writing apocalyptic poetry about the demise of civilization. Assignment: comparing Grand Master Flash to T.S. Elliot.

Involving students in researching their own communities, with goal of making world a better place. Using an Inconvenient Truth, for example, as a key piece, moving kids beyond their own issues to issues of world. Engaging in research to make the world a better place = Youth Voices.

Critical Minds Project: English class for 9th grade, low-performing students - “A Day in My Life” was first prompt for these east L.A. students. Turned essays in photo essays > digital film.

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” Marshall McLuhan

“The question is not whether English will change, but how it will change.” Ernest Morrell

To see Ernest’s PowerPoint: http://www.ernestmorrell.com/ (user=profmorrell; password=morrell).

I’ll send out a Tweet as soon as I’ve uploaded the podcast for the session.

Kathy Yancy is the opening speaker for NCTE’s Institute for 21st Century Literacies.

• First task: Define literacy
• Second task: Define 21st century literacy
• Third task: Identify 10 key terms that define 21st literacy
• Fourth task: Put key terms onto chart paper in some form. Here’s what our group of 4 came up with (using Wordle.net)

Bonus of opening session: Kyene Beers‘ explanation of “dip in/dip out” approach to Holt Language Arts program - very different than the scripted approach! I’ll be doing a podcast with her later in the conference.

My two weeks at the Holocaust Seminar were amazing, just amazing. Because I need some time to reflect on the depth and breadth of what I learned, I’m planning to share the experience and resources a bit at a time, starting with the way I started most of my days: walking through Central Park’s Strawberry Fields.

I’m heading out tonight for New York City , where I will spend the next two weeks at Columbia University participating in the 2008 Memorial Library Summer Seminar on Holocaust Education. I am already anticipating that these 14 days will be a life-changing experience. I realize that across time there are common threads between the events that trigger discrimination, exclusion, and the forced removal of any group of people. Going into the event, it is my plan to develop a lesson around Ishmael Beah’s compelling story (which I first discovered at a local Starbucks) A Long Way Gone - Memoirs of a Boy Soldier.

There are many similarities between the Holocaust and the genocides of the 21st century, but there is, I believe, one significant difference: the absence of the Internet during WWII. In presenting the dark side of history to students, today educators can also provide opportunities and venues for students to take social action. Eighth-grade history teacher George Mayo’s Many Voices of Darfur project and Canadian teachers Jim Carleton and Mali Bickely’s collaborative projects (NECC 2008 keynote speakers) are excellent examples of empowering students to make a difference. Celebrities such as Robert DeNiro are tapping into the power of the Internet, especially video, with powerful pieces such as Armed and Innocent, which includes an interview with Ishmael Beah that I will be including in my lesson.

I realize that the Holocaust Seminar will be an intellectual and emotional roller coaster ride and that, for many reasons, including the  challenges inherent with writing about the unthinkable and unspeakable, not all sessions will be “bloggable” - it is the lessons learned - and to be learned, along with the resources, that I hope to share out with other teachers and their students.

Memorial Library image from: http://tinyurl.com/6xwvaj

Arnie Abrams is opening the session by stating that digital storytelling should be more about the writing - and the writing process - than about the technology.

Benefits of digital storytelling:

• can be made interactive
• provides real audience
• works for the “YouTube generation”
• helps develop visual literacy
• helps to understand mass media
• requires presentation skills
• develops writing skills

We can now do digital storytelling 2.0 - interactive (VoiceThread - my idea, not his;-)

Ten step development process:

• start with a good story
• write an outline/script
• storyboard
• brainstorm visual ideas, music
• findavisual, shoot
• edit visulas
• add title , graphics
• record narration
• match visual to audio. add music
• produce, revise, present, distribute

Meg Ormiston quote “Without a structure students will focus on adding images, music, and other elements instead of focusing on the content and organization”

Storyboarding - recommends using index cards so kids can move slides around.

Ways to build a digital story:

• Stills in a folder
• PowerPoint (export PNGs)
• Slide show programs - Photoshop Elements
• Video editing programs
• Flash
• DVD authoring

Software options:

• iPhoto - Mac only and lacks features, such as titles
• Photoshop Elements - has slideshow option - with 2 audio tracks! And nice pan and zoom effect; add clip art on top of images via drag and drop; good edit control - but only makes WMV format - appropriate for 5th grade on up
• PhotoStory 3 - Windows only. You can work only with stills - and doesn’t run with Vista. You can bring in your own music - or create your own copyright-free music.

Video Editors:

• Corel VideoStudio - appropriate for 6th grade up - Windows only. Allows importing music and video from DVDs. Bottom third option for text. Has 5.1 surround sound - nice for exporting to DVDs. Also allows exporting into all the basic formats (mov, avi, etc.)
• iMovie - previous versions great, but iLife 08 pretty much sucks - but you can download previous version.
• Clicker - works on Mac and Windows - Arnie has developed storytelling templates to get kids started. Appropriate for primary kids. Includes text reader, but they can also use microphone option.

Tip for copyright issues: Include a disclaimer on your site with offer to remove images, etc., by request. Here’s a sample one from Arnie:

“Many of the digital stories on our site include images and audio found on the Internet using commonly available search engines. The stories have been created for non-profit, educational use by students and teachers and we hope are within the fair use protection of existing copyright laws. If any copyright owner objects to the use of any work appearing on this site, please contact us and we will remove the work and review the propriety of including it.”

Can’t pass up a session with Hall Davidson! Hall is opening the session with a look at the stats on who allows/who forbids use of cell phones. It’s a long list on the “allow” side; a short one on the forbid side (Fidel Castro, the Talian, US school districts).

The ability to immediately send a communication - What’s the application? Kids can be creative with use of a cell phone - hey, they have them in their pockets, duh.

Video:

• YouTube account and put in cell phone - first step in uploading video from cell phone to YouTube.
• Old School: voice messages pushed to community
• New School: Push video messages - you can push out a video - the power of having a human face attached to message. Tremendous difference between text and images.
• Sample video - 3rd grade teacher in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. Video of Henry autistic student, making his first presentation in school, sent to parents via cell phone.

Telephone:

• Jott.com - voice to text - you can send it to Twitter. Anything that can receive text, jott can go to. Application? Intervention officer has automatic transcription of student encounter. Transcription source.
• We’re pretty close to translation cell phones.
• GCast.com - Jen Dorman is doing great podcasts through GCast. Question: what would be a good use of cell phone in education: 888-654-2278 (Enter origianl Number if you’re using someone else’s account 301-785-0719 3) enter password 8534 4) speak) 5) when you’re done, press ## (twice). If you would rather use text, text a story in 6 words.
• PollEverywhere.com - As you text in, your data is being tallied live. You can get the data in a chart or other options.

Next steps: Revise AUPs to include ethical, acceptable use of cell phones.