Voicethread Beginning with email and instant messages and stretching to texting and synchronous video web conferencing, digital dialogue has gradually become a common element of everyday life for today's students—another opportunity to “gather.” The kinds of personal relationships shaped on the playground in an earlier era are now developed in MySpace and Facebook. While the format may be different, the purpose remains the same: Our students are crafting identities and are driven to connect. Unrelenting Desire to Interact This innate and unrelenting desire to interact was probably best defined Danah Boyd—a PhD student at the University of California-Berkeley studying the networks developing between digital youth—in a 2008 blog post when she wrote: School is one of the few times when they can get together with their friends and they use every unscheduled moment to socialize - passing time, when the teacher's back is turned, lunch, bathroom breaks, etc. Sounds a lot like your own students, doesn’t it!
Telling a Story- Creating Poems with Animoto There is a growing list of incredible sites and tools to give wings to our and our students’ creativity in telling stories. These stories can be poems, voice, text, video, music and so much more, only limited by our own creativity. Last year I concentrated on exploring tools such as In addition to these tools, take a look at Here is my attempt to convert a poem by Jorge Luis Borges into an Animoto music video with my images. First I picked a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, that spoke to me.Segmented the poem and typed the words separately onto different slides into PowerPointChanged fonts style and background colorSaved the slides as individual pictures *( You might have to go into “Options” to make sure it exports ALL the slides not just your selected slide)Uploaded these slides into animotoUploaded images that connected the words and the feeling of the poem for meArranged images in orderUploaded Creative Commons MP3 musicFinalized the movie Here is my Animoto embedded video: Like this: