Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: 5 #BacktoSchool management tips for innovative edu...

Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: 5 #BacktoSchool management tips for innovative edu...: A version of this post originally appeared in Partners in Learning 1:1 Hot Topics Chatting with friends, playing games, cheating, crui...

Safe Social Media

Here's a link to a video of the Online Social Media Safety program presented at Marietta High School, sponsored by the Georgia Attorney General's office, WSBTV, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and Facebook.

http://bcove.me/1x9srdq3

Tradigital Storytelling

I was looking through my email and articles from Discovery Education when the title of an article caught my attention, Tradigital Storytelling.  How do you merge traditional story telling, digital technology, and encourage the shy student who hates to write?  This answer might surprise you!

Many articles have been written about a myriad of modern day tools to create digital storytelling projects.  Google it, Bing it, or just ask Siri, and you'll get a long list of tools and websites for recording audio, video, talking cartoon animations, etc.  For the geeks and those who have all the modern hardware, these can be fun and exciting tools for both teachers and students.

But what about the teacher who is not so confident and/or competent in technology use?  Here's a "low-tech" suggestion that can be upgraded to a higher level, or not.  Most schools still have a bunch of old overhead projectors sitting around taking up shelf space.  (Personally, I always kept one in my classroom as a backup plan in case the digital projector wouldn't work, the internet went down, or the computer died in the middle of my presentation.) 

With nothing more than an overhead projector, some transparencies, and a thin white shower curtain or sheet, you can create an instant shadow puppet theater!  Students can write their story, draw the background scene on a transparency, draw, color, and cut out the main characters on transparencies, and present their story from behind the curtain.  The picture projected from behind and showing through the curtain will be reversed to the viewers in front of the curtain, so text doesn't work well.

Next, you can add technology enhancements.  It could be as basic as videoing the presentation with an iPad or smartphone and uploading to your website.  Or, you could add to the presentation itself with background music, sound effects, pre-recorded voices, etc., using a microphone and the free program Audacity, or using an iPad app.  You could also do something similar using your ELMO. 


Take a look at a sample of an overhead story presented by a second grader:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AKBsMcPBLg&feature=youtu.be