Of all the Web 2.0 tools, VoiceThread is probably my favorite, so powerful, yet easy to learn. So when I saw Paul Allison’s email invitation to join last night’s Teachers Teaching Teachers session with VT developers Ben Pappert and Steve Muth, I grabbed my headset and logged in, ready to learn about VT’s new Groups feature.

I’ve learned to always keep a notepad by me during the TTT sessions to jot down gems.  And last night’s session was filled with them, both by the guest speakers and in the chatroom discussion.

In looking over my notes, I see I’ve highlighted insights shared by Bill Ferriter. I follow his blog and therefore already had an appreciation of his strategies for engaging students with VT in meaningful ways. Here are a few gems from last night’s conversation:

• We need to teach our students the skill of commenting! Bill provides students with guidelines such as “find a point made by someone else and respond to it.” To keep students focused, he limits them to adding only one new thread to a conversation.
• We need to teach – and model for – our students the art of “collaborative dialogues,” including the skills of “productive conflict.”  Challenge them to find something they don’t agree with and in their commenting, “respectfully disagree.”

As soon as Paul has added the link to the last night’s discussion, I’ll return to this post and add it.

Of all the EB enhancements James Farmer has added over the past year, The Edublogger is my absolute favorite.  Such great tips, so well explained, and so easy to turn around and apply to my own blog and blogging practices.  Thank you, James, and Happy Birthday to The Edublogger (Sue Waters)!

Seems like with every contest The Edublogger promotes (i.e., 30-Day Challenge to Better Commenting), both the process and the product become road maps for 21st century teaching and learning. So in response to Sue’s call to join the celebration by writing a post on any of 12 topics, here’s my contribution:

#9 Favorite Blog Widget: ClustrMaps – Last year I was helping Jim Faires, a 6th grade teacher in my district, get his students up and running with YouthRadio, a collaborative project developed by Kevin Hodgson. Jim was introducing his students to podcasting. The question he posed to the class was “What if the whole world was your audience?!”

When the students completed their podcast, they watched as Jim uploaded it to the YouthRadio blog.  It was then that one of the them spotted the ClustrMap. Jim opened the enlarged view. Try to imagine their amazement and exhuberance when they realized the blog had visitors from all parts of the world and every continent (ok, not Antarctica). Suddenly students were scurring for an atlas to accurately identify each state and country.

Not only was the ClustrMap a built-in geography lesson, but it also illustrated and answered Jim’s question: truly, the whole world had become their audience.

Looking for resources for Black History Month? Thanks to the wonderful Sacramento Educational Cable Consortium (SECC), you can read about my recent videoconference with Tuskegee Airman Alexander Jefferson, and then watch the clips:

Still in awe of how videoconferencing can enrich teaching and learning – way beyond the walls of the classroom.

Pictures reach audiences more directly than the alone. They communicate the author’s tone and approach to the subject, and enhance our understanding and enjoyment of the text. Illustrations explain complicated ideas at a glance and even teach those who cannot read.”

The next few weeks I’ll be helping teachers and their students (mostly 4th graders) transform video clips and photos into 1 – 3 minute films, ready to submit to several regional film competitions and events, so I’ve been thinking about the power of images.

Picturing the written word: The above image and quote are from the Smithsonian’s stunning online exhibit Picturing Words: the Power of Book Illustration. As a teacher, I’ve observed over and over how illustrations provide scaffolding to emerging readers. As a parent, I transformed my new-born daughter’s room into the setting from Margaret Wise Brown’s Good Night Moon. (A nice lady in our local hardware store helped find just the right shade of green. OK, and for the picture of the bears, my husband insisted on using some card-playing dogs, but I did have the cow-jumping-over-the-moon picture.) As an auntie whose Christmas present is always a book, my nieces and newphews all have a growing collections of Chris Van Allsburg ’s books.

Picturing the spoken word: I still claim the title of Queen of Bad Photography, and so I am always on the look for mentor “texts,” Who would argue that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” but is there a difference if those words are written or spoken (narrated)? I’m thinking not so much.  Thanks to mentoring and resources shared by Krishna Harrison-Munoz and Mathew Needleman, I’m starting to get a handle on the purpose and possibilities behind the basic camera shots and camera angles.

Shifting from story to film: About a year ago, NWP colleague Kevin H. referred me to a pretty amazing book: The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick. With 284 pages of original drawings that students can identify as establishing shots, close ups, extreme close ups, etc., I think you’ll agree with the publisher’s description: “...Brian Selznick breaks open the novel form to create an entirely new reading experience. Here is a stunning, cinematic tour de force from a boldly innovative storyteller, artist, and bookmaker.” Just seems as though “filmmaker” should be added to that list. Checkout the flash slideshow for a glimpse into the storyline and a possible transition from written word to spoken word.

I’m thinking that the written word is equal to or even more powerful than the accompanying illustration. But for the spoken word, I think it can be overriden by the accompanying camera angles and shots. So I’ll end with a new favorite resource for students: Photojojo: Super-Secret Photo Projects Just for Kids – Back off, Grown Ups! (posted to Instructify by Alice Mercer).

*Image from: http://www.sil.si.edu/exhibitions/picturingwords/

Emily Davis, production assistant for the Teacher Salary Project emailed me this weekend with the following message:

“Dear Gail Desler,

I am writing on behalf of Academy Award-winning filmmaker Vanessa Roth, co-founder of 826 National Nínive Calegari, and writer Dave Eggers. They are the Director and Co-Producers of the feature-length documentary The Teacher Salary Project. We wanted to reach out to you in the hopes that you may be interested in getting involved in our production.

The Teacher Salary Project will be a documentary film, a national outreach campaign, and the only digital archive of the stories of teachers’ lives. In the end we will have a community-built movement that tells the true stories of hardworking and effective teachers in order to change the public perception, support, and financial rewards that accompany the invaluable work of teaching. The film is based on a book co-authored by Nínive Calegari, Daniel Moulthrop and Dave Eggers called Teachers Have it Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers. You can read a Washington Post review of the book here <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/23/AR2005062301562_pf.html> .

We are excited to invite first-hand stories/ footage filmed by students about their public school teachers and the struggles of being a teacher. In this spirit, we are looking for public school teachers to help get their students involved. We found your name in searching for teachers that have already done some work with film or digital storytelling in the classroom, and hope that you would be interested in becoming part of this new and exciting way of filmmaking.

To learn more about the project you can check out our website at <http://www.theteachersalaryproject.org/>. To get an idea of what we are looking for, visit our student information page <http://www.theteachersalaryproject.org/studentvideo.html>, where you and your students can get some ideas for what we’re looking for and how to get involved in the project. If we are able to use your submission in the final film we will hold a premiere screening at your school!

If you think this is something that you might be interested in helping with, or if you could perhaps suggest others who you think might be interested, please let us know. I look forward to hearing from you.”

I was drawn in by the link to Rafe Esquith’s article and  also the connection to Dave Eggers (whose book What Is the What is in my Current Reads box). In this year of horrendous budget cuts, what better time to tell our stories, or, better yet, enlist our students to provide a window into the real world of classroom teaching.

*Image copied from http://www.theteachersalaryproject.org/about.html#aboutProj

If you’re looking for filmmaking venues for you and your students, here are some sites I think you’ll want to checkout:

• 2009 World Math Day Video Contest – For grades 3 -8, Teacher Tube and Voyager Expanded Learning are partnering for this event. Includes prizes!
• BrainyFlix SAT Vocab Video Contest – I’ve already blogged about this contest, but checkout the samples posted to the site.  What a great way for students to contribute to a resource they can also benefit from. Includes prizes!

• Letters to the Next President Video Campaign – In the fall, the National Writing Project and Google teamed to sponsor the Letters to the Next President Google Docs project.  The NWP is now partnering with the Pearson Foundation for the next level – student-produced videos. The project “encourages filmmakers ages 13–18, with the support of their teachers, to voice their points of view by creating and sharing digital videos about the issues they want President Obama and his new administration to address.”

I first learned of the Bay Area Writing Project when my daughter was in 2nd grade at Rooftop Elementary School in San Francisco. At a PTA meeting, teachers enthusiastically shared how a summer institute across the bay had completely changed the way they would be delivering writing curriculum to their students.

And I remember my daughter coming home with her writer’s notebook and talking about “sloppy copy” and “author’s chair” and, just, well, wanting to talk about her writing.

We moved the following year out of the Bay Area and up to the Sierra foothills, where I eventually fell into a teaching job at my daughter’s school – and where I learned about the Area 3 Writing Project, the Sacramento region’s counterpart to the BAWP. I had the good fortune in 1995 to attend the A3WP Summer Institute.  Like the Rooftop teachers, I began the next school year with a commitment to bring out the writer in every student.

It’s easy to make commitments like the above when you know you can count on the support of the amazing Writing Project network.  For example, checkout what I found this morning while browsing the National Writing Project website: Literacy, ELL, and Digital Storytelling: 21st Century Learning in Action. I’ve had the pleasure of attending Clifford Lee’s Digital Stoytelling session live during an NWP conference. But now, thanks to a collaborative effort between the BAWP, NWP, and the Pearson Foundation, Cliff’s wonderful immigration project is online.  This video is but one of the many resources posted to the site, providing the scaffolding for teachers thinking about structuring an immigration project – or any kind of documentary project.

What a gift to have 24/7 access to best practices for digital storytelling from teachers like Clifford Lee and his colleague Yumi Matsui!