School 1.0

• Rituals, rules, and routines
• Focus on the right answers
• This is okay.

School 2.0

• Engaged
• Self-directed
• Project-driven
•  Independent problem solvers
• Teachers and students are empowered
• Learning community

Meaningfulness + Significance + Connectedness =  Contribution

EXAMPLE:

Conrad calls the school during summer vacation, wants to come to school to work on his video project.  He won’t take no for an answer.  The school secretary forwards the call to Principal Tim Tyson.  The principal explains that it is too late to make your class grade better, the report cards have already been printed.  “But Dr. Tyson, I got an A”, Conrad explained.   “You said if the project was perfect, you would put it on the school website and into the iTunes Store for the whole world to see”, he continued.  The next day, Conrad showed up at 9am with two of his partners to get back to work on his project.

For the first time, schools can have access to true global distribution.

MabryOnline & iTunes

• School website serves up 1.5 million files per month on average.
• In June 2007, it served up 4 million files.
• People can subscribe to school content via iTunes.

The deal that Dr. Tyson put forth to his students:

• Your work has to be the best of the best
• Ask yourself: “What is it about your work that is so great that it needs to be out there for the entire world to see?”
• Students from New Dehli, Tasmania, Beijing, Shanghai, Peru, Georgia, Australia, UK are viewing their work.
• Students feel a great deal of satisfaction when their work is globally relevant.
• This is authentic assessment: when an A is not good enough for a student.

When does meaningfulness start?

• First job?
• Graduate college?
• Right now!
• We need to have a meaningful activities for students right now.

Project on Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research

• The students approached Dr. Tyson with their topic.
• Two weeks later, the students (on their own) had already scheduled a field trip to Emory University to spend two hours with Dr. Chetta in her research lab.  She presented one of the same intro presentations that she does for her doctoral students and physicians.
• Produced a movie that Patrice Weaver said was the best thing she’d ever seen.  Won the film festival.

Students wanted to make a difference, not just report:

• Commercialization of Drinking Water
• Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research
  • Shot everything but the video of the sonogram.
• Child Slave Labor on the Ivory Coast
  • “Social studies, but more grown up.”
• Saving African lives from Malaria
• Captivity of Elephants
• Poverty in China
• Organ Donation
  • Done like the series 24.
  • Students created every scene except for two that were recorded in the operating room by Emory University.
• Immigration in United States
• Genetically Modified Food
  • Students changed the way their principal buys his food.

Not all about technology and connectivity

• “I wish we could get away from this argument in our profession.”
• The effective educator is the one who bridges the gap between technology and meaningfulness.
• Students want to go beyond preparing for the next year, they want to make a contribution today.
• School 1.0 = Taking it in
• School 2.0 = Giving it out
• We need to stop simplifying our students’ education into tiny little segments.

Dr. Tyson’s closing keynote video/slides can be found here.

Link to session information page here.

OR: iTunes/YouTube and the Academic MySpace

This topic in one word: VOICE (individual identity, reflection, meaning making, and new literacy).

Why digital stories in ePortfolios?

• Reflection is the heart and soul of a portfolio
• Digital stories can humanize any model of ePortfolio

Plugs The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman.

“How we educate our children may prove to be more important than how much.”

Plugs A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink.

Balancing right brain skills for conceptual age with the left brain skills for the information age.

6 Essential High-Concept, High Touch Aptitudes

1. Design - create objects
2. Story - ability to fashion a compelling narrative
3. Symphony - synthesis
4. Empathy - forge relationships
5. Play - laughter clubs
6. Meaning - pulling it all together

Experiential Learning Model - Practice and Metacognition as a continuous cycle.

Storytelling as a theory of learning.

Learner ownership and Control of Electronic Portfolio Development.

Digital storytelling process:

Learners create a 1-4 minute story (digital video clip, first person narrative, illustrated by still images, music track to add tone).

Purposes of Storytelling

1. Voice & Personality - Enhanced Audio of Granddaughter Victoria (so much energy!)
2. Legacy - My Sister Sarah (tell story about her newborn sisters’ fight with cancer)
3. Biography - Victoria reads her autobiography.
4. Memoir - focuses on the memories of the storyteller, often much longer than a typical story.
5. Reflection-Transition - Young man explains why he became a teacher to one of his elementary school teacher.
6. Reflection-Decision - Use a digital story to weigh the options in a decision to be made, document the process used to make decisions.
7. Benchmarking Development - A digital story as a snapshot throughout the development of a learner (example had a series of digital stories, twice a year from kindergarten to senior year in high school).
8. Change Over Time - Maintain a collection of work over time to help recognize when growth has occurred. Victoria talks about how much she has grown since kindergarten now that she is in 1st grade.
9. Evidence of Collaboration - provide explanation of the process of a group’s collaborative process on a project.
10. Documentary - Take the place of a PowerPoint or research paper. Story takes on the characteristics of a documentary, often fact-based without emotional content.
11. Record of Experience - Experience doesn’t always yield a discrete artifact. A digital story can reflect and document and experience and be presented as final evidence of an experience. Documenting a rural Alaska experience.
12. Oral Language - Learning to speak in a second language. Learners record their voice, speaking or reading aloud at different stages in their development.
13. Rich Digital Artifacts - Showcase student work with an explanatory narrative. Replacement for written narrative because some students have trouble reflecting textually.

Voice = Authenticity, digital storytelling brings out that voice.

Process to develop digital stories:

1. Script development, sometimes in groups called story circles.
2. Record the author reading the story (audio recording/editing)
3. Capture and process the images
4. Recods/edit the video.
5. Present/share the digital story.

Online tools for video editing:

• BubbleShare
• PrimaryAccess
• JumpCut
• EyeSpot
• PhotoBucket

Online tools for audio editing:

• Odeo
• Podomatic

Link to session page here.