Digital Storytelling Tools

The following is a "glog" about potential tools for a DST trial at a local elementary school in the fall.
Click each tool for details.

Book Trailers: Moving toward the Future of Digital Publishing

Have you ever seen a book trailer? Nowadays, the traditional book selling activities such as book talks in multiple cities are not very attractive. Instead, with the advances in technology and the belt-tightening economy, publishers and authors are actively looking for web alternatives to promote their books.

Especially in the world of children's literature, things are changing fast.

Award-winning storyteller Dianne de Las Casas has created a Ning community for sharing and discussing kidlit book trailers. Authors can post their trailers and other videos (such as activities with children during school visits). Bibliophiles can discover great reads by watching those videos.

Here’s a gorgeous one from the site: Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by author/illustrator Grace Lin.

Newly Issued Pearson Film Series: Visionaries in 21st-Century Education

The film series newly issued by the Person Foundation, named "A 21st Century Education," highlights twelve innovative and compelling school-reform leaders from around the world and cases they presented in the field of education. The series was produced by the Mobile Learning Institute, a co-funded effort by Nokia and the Pearson Foundation.

All movie series are black and white. They are downloadable, each lasting for 10-15 minutes.

The first set of films profile and explore the following:
· Steve Barr and the Takeover of Locke High School in Watts
· James Dierke and Leadership Models for Urban Middle Schools
· David “T.C.” Ellis and Essential Learning at Hip Hop High
· Randall Fielding and Designing Schools for 21st Century Learning
· Stephen Heppell and Empowering Young Learners
· Jean Johnson, Notschool.net and Online Learning for Disaffected Youth
· Doug McCurry and the Success of Achievement First
· George McKenna and Personalizing Public Education
· Alan November and the Myths and Opportunities of Technology
· Larry Rosenstock and Project-based Learning at High Tech High
· Elliot Soloway/Cathie Norris and Educating the Mobile Generation
· Yong Zhao: No Child Left Behind and Global Competitiveness

I just had a brief look at two of them and got very impressed:

Disaffected youth’s experiences with multimedia
NCLB and global competition from a Chinese professor’s perspective

Textbooks Go Digital in California

As reported by eSchool News, California State has approved a new initiative on digital textbooks, which aims at encouraging all public schools in California to use free, open digital textbooks.

The recent state report tells that the main subjects covered in this initiative are math and science (e.g., geometry, biology, chemistry, earth science, etc.) for high school students. The main publishers selected include CK-12 Foundation, Pearson Education, Curriki, Connexions, Dr. H. Jerome Keisler, etc.

The report doesn’t mention how the state will apply those textbooks in public classrooms, in the aspects of available devices, technologies or web resources involved, teaching methods, and curriculum development. In my opinion, this initiative will first of all demand “one desktop/laptop per child” in the classroom, which will definitely cost a lot.

I also wonder how the state will expect teachers to use “static” digital textbooks in various grades. I have a few questions in mind:

• Can students manage the readings on a computer screen?
• Is it appropriate to demand teachers use textbooks to teach math and science instead of showing students hands-on examples/experiments in classroom teaching?
• Will those textbooks be accessible to other states?
• How can teachers track students’ readings of digital textbooks?
• How can students make notes of their readings?
• Will the digital textbooks bring a radical change (see the picture above) to the physical environment of classroom?
• ...
  

The books will be issued in the coming months and the state officials are also going to review potential digital textbooks in other subjects (e.g., English literacy?) as reported.

Under the current information age, it is a good strategy for schools to keep updated with technology. However, as for digital textbooks, is the current technology mature enough to bring the engaging literacy experience, activities, and processes of thinking that teachers and educators expect?

About Chinese Valentine's Day

Tomorrow is the Chinese Valentine’s Day which is also called Qi Xi or Qi Qiao Jie. It happens on the seventh day of the seventh month in the Chinese lunar calendar. So the date varies every year in the lunar time zone:

Year 2010 is on August 16, 2010
Year 2011 is on August 6, 2011
Year 2012 is on August 23, 2012

According to Chinese folklore, when you look up in the sky on this special day, you can see the Vega Star crossing the Milky Way to meet the Altair Star. Chinese believe that the girl (weaver) will cross the Heavenly River to meet her lover (cowherd) over a bridge physically built up by magpies on this Valentine's Day once a year.

There are two legends around the origin of this day.

The first legend is about the freedom of love.

It is a love story about the seventh daughter of the Heavenly Father and an orphaned cowherd. The Father separated them. She was forced to move to the star Vega and the cowherd moved to the star Altair. They are allowed to meet only once a year on the day of seventh day of seventh lunar month. The story began from the good-looking poor orphaned boy living with his elder brother and sister-in-law. After his parents past away, his brother inherited the house and the land. The boy only owned an old ox. He needed to work on the farm's field with the ox everyday. So he was called a cowherd. His daily life was just like in a Cinderella story…

The second legend is about love and responsibility.

On the east bank of the Heavenly River lived a weaving maiden. The Heavenly Mother made her work day and night weaving cloth for gods and goddesses. Since the weaver lived all alone, the Heavenly Mother took pity on her and allowed her to marry a cowherd boy who lived on the west bank of the Heavenly River. The weaver enjoyed her marriage so much that she stopped weaving. This angered the Heavenly Mother, so she kidnapped the weaver, took her back across the river, and allowed her to see the cowherd only once a year over a bridge formed by magpies.

One of the most famous poems about the legend was written by Qin Guan in the Song Dynasty (960-1279).

FAIRY OF THE MAGPIE BRIDGE

Translation by Kylie Hsu

Among the beautiful clouds,

Over the heavenly river,

Crosses the weaving maiden.

A night of rendezvous,

Across the autumn sky,

Surpasses joy on earth.

Moments of tender love and dream,

So sad to leave the magpie bridge.

Eternal love between us two,

Shall withstand the time apart.

Compared with love stories in Western stories, such as Romeo and Juliet, the story of this Chinese couple seems not as intense and passionate. Love doesn't kill or end up by breaking up the barrier between them. They just wait patiently on each side of the Milky Way, believing that their love can fight against their time apart. It is faith and emotional liaison instead of physical attraction and desire that are emphasized and appreciated in the story as well as in many other Chinese folk stories about love.

Both unmarried and married lovers can celebrate this Qi Qiao Jie. It is a great occasion to show love and care to your beloved or your significant other. Traditionally, for unmarried girls, they will gather together and pray for a better personal skill and good luck in finding their lovers. A noble lady’s praying words usually would look like: 1) wish her country great prosperity, 2) wish her parents good heath, and finally 3) wish herself a good husband. The last is the most important.

Wish everyone a happy happy Qi Qiao Jie tomorrow!

New Development of "Green Programs" in the U.S.

As reported by Technical Education, five states -- Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, Ohio, and Oregon-- have committed to developing green career and technical education initiatives. In collaboration with the United States Department of Education, the states will create secondary and post-secondary programs that will lead to certificates and associate and bachelor degrees.

"Green means healthier learning environments for students and adults, plus lower energy costs and a stronger economy," said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, also in a statement released this week. "Green programs of study support the administration's goal of expanding a green workforce by preparing students for high-skill, high-wage jobs in a clean energy economy.

Among the five, Oregon has been pioneering in its industrial construction and development in this field. It has developed a pilot solar-powered high way, the first of its kind in the nation, installed with a 104kW system comprised of 594 panels.

Its annual production is about 128 megawatt-hours – enough to power about 10 typical homes for a year. However, The Oregon Dept of Transportation (ODOT) is using it to power the lights at the I-5 & I-205 exchange.

Meanwhile, earlier this month, Austin announced its pilot program called Sunflowers, An Electric Garden.

Designed by public art team Harries/Heder, the installation consists of 15 flower-like solar photovoltaic panels located on a pedestrian and bike path between the village of Mueller and Austin’s highway I-35.

Global warming and decreased non-renewable energy resources have become the most crucial issues faced by human beings. While, secondary and post-secondary schools have started to pay attention to bring "green" to their program design, mainly focusing on cultivating future "green" engineers/technologists, however, "green" ideas are missed in most of the K-12 curricula. Additional content orientations in arts and aesthetics are mentioned a lot in the educational field, but the idea of applying "green" in daily life are not integrated into K-12 curricula as well as most teacher education programs. While we want our children to be knowledgeable, artistic, creative, critical, and thoughtful as individuals, we also want them to be aware of global and social issues: we really need to work hard to make our living places better, for ourselves and for the next generations.

July School Visit

I got a chance to visit a school in New Jersey with my colleagues at the EdLab in July. The school was reconstructed from a chocolate factory. The new space is featured with a roof garden and its "green" utilization of the old resources. How to work "greenly", eat "greenly", and design "greenly" is one of main focuses of the school curriculum.









An Integrated School Curriculum on History, Ecology, and Space

One of the main questions we brought with us during the visit was: How do environments/spaces influence teaching and learning at St. Philip's? As introduced by Ralph, the main designer and member of the school board, the school believes in a school curriculum built on student-centered real-life experiences. The redesigned space and the “green roof” extend the school’s options in its curricular development. It integrates the following curricular focuses (from space redesign) into teaching and learning:

History

The display of new interior design and elements of old building (i.e., an old chocolate factory) gives teachers a curricular focus on the history of Newark as a major industrial zone in the East Coast. Students will be able to reflect on the history through their daily hands-on experiences in the space.

Ecology and Sustainability
The new space lets students learn about how to utilize old buildings and how to work “green”. The design utilizes as many old resources as possible, including ceilings, walls (of the stairways), and old desks and chairs. It also pays attention to energy saving devices. Every classroom is installed with sensored lights and there is a solar-energy panel on top of the school which provides a small portion of energy for the building.

“Green Roof” Integration
“Green roof”, the school’s roof garden, is integrated to most of the academic subjects, including math, science, literacy, and social studies. Every class has got a spot on the roof and they do seeding, planting, and harvesting there. Lower-grade students use the garden to learn counting and recording numbers, while higher-grade students can learn and write about biological life cycles and geographical origins of the plants.

Nutrition
Meals served by the school’s dinning room are connected to the “green roof”, too. During the harvest season, students eat food from the garden and learn about nutrition as well as how to eat “green”. The nutrition program has a big impact on students’ lives, as told by Charity, students take “green” ideas home and “teach” their parents how to eat healthy.

Aesthetics, Design and Engineering
The color scheme of the school is “From Earth to Sky”, with each floor assigned with a main different color ranging from light yellow (earth) to light blue (sky). The redesigned space (with all the details in colors, interior display, and ecological devices) gives students a great opportunity to learn about aesthetics, design, as well as engineering from the angel of how to work “green” -- How to design a new space from an old building, how to do “green” interior design, how to match colors, how to design and put energy saving devices within the building?

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More School Information

History of Newark Schools
As introduced by Ralph, Newark is a traditional industrial zone. Almost 85% of the products of the East Coast are produced from this city. However, the public school system failed in the last 40 years, thus a huge number of private and charter schools have been established. The neighborhood of St. Philips is close to Hispanic town. The neighborhood is also one of the roughest areas in western New Jersey. It gets high racial attention and a high need for new schools. The new St. Philips is located close to three higher education institutions (e.g., Rutgers and NJIT) for the purpose of getting the resources of those institutions’ secondary-school support. The location of St. Philips housed a chocolate factory and the school design started about three years ago.

School Information
St. Philips was established in 1988 with a first-grade class. In the recent 20 years, it has relocated three times from downtown area to a small piece of land close to Newark Museum before moving to the current “warehouse”. “It has tripled the size where we came from”, as introduced by Ralph. Currently it is a private k-8 school, with two classes per grade and 18 students per class. Though as a private school, it grants scholarships/financial aid to about 60% of its student population. The school’s ethnic information shows that 96% of the students are African American students, while Asian, Hispanic, and Caucasian American students constitute the rest of the student group. Most students are from lower or lower-middle socioeconomic classes.

Admission
The admissions are considered for families in need, as given by Ralph, the school believes that the admissions should consider more about students who can take the ability to learn rather than students with parents have the ability to pay. Besides, potential students need to go through a testing process. For younger students, the test is relatively subjective, while for older students, there are entrance tests prepared for them. As further introduced, most of the St. Philip’s graduates have been doing well in their high schools. For example, 80% of them take advanced math courses in the first year of high school.

School Redesign
The process of school redesign has involved Ralph and the main administrators of the school since January 2007.

Technology
Every classroom has a projector, a desktop computer, a SmartBoard, and a stereo radio/CD player. However, there is no separate media lab or computer lab at the school.

A Tour with a Group of High School Students
We were touring around the school with a group of 11 local high school students. We noticed that though students asked limited questions, but the garden and the gym were the places where students frequently talked to each other and raised the most questions (to Ralph). The following may reflect the part of school redesign that interests them most:

• “Did you get a good pay as a designer?”
• “How much is the project?”
• “Can the building be fully solar powered?”
• “What is the cost for electronic coil?”
• “Does every floor have a restroom?”
• “What is the cost of the grass?”
• …

Students seemed very interested in Ralph’s job, they asked several repeated questions about it at different places. However, when Ralph asked them about their future job plans, most students said they were not certain and only 1-2 of them answered that they would be interested in getting a job related to sustainability and environment. This observation indicates that students are interested/concerned about getting jobs, and education of design, sustainability and ecology at local high schools is to a large degree ignored.

First National Study on American Elementary Classrooms after NCLB

In today's keynote, Stephanie also introduced this article published in Science about the quantity and quality of instruction and the relationship between teachers and students in American elementary classrooms. It is the first national study of its kind after the implementation of NCLB.


Here are a few highlights important to look at:

• The study is based on direct observations of first, third, and fifth grades in 1000 elementary schools and 400 school districts.
• In fifth grade, children spent most of their time (91.2%) working in whole-group or individual-seatwork settings. Students spent little time (7%) in small-group instruction (two to five students).
• In fifth grade, 37% of instruction was in literacy and 25% was in math; in first and third grade, more than 50% of instruction was in literacy and less than 10% was in math.
• Very little instruction or classroom activity was given in technology.
• Few opportunities were provided to learn in small groups, to improve analytic cal skills, or to interact extensively with teachers.
• Typically, over the course of a 20-minute period, instruction involved only one method or mode (e.g., vocabulary worksheet or watching the teacher do math problems).
• Teachers most of the time gave generic feedback on correctness rather than encouraging extension of student performance or discussing alternative solutions.
• Classroom dynamics were not related to teachers’ degree status or experience.

The most surprising finding for me is the ineffective elementary-level teacher education in the U.S. Being at an educational institution as prestigious and progressive as TC let me ignore an important fact that not only that no child should be left behind but also no teacher should be left behind. On one hand, the national DOE and a number of professors in higher educational institutions keep proposing that all K-12 teachers should have master's degrees. However, on the other hand, the quality of teacher education programs is doubtful. The spread of higher educational degrees doesn't mean a spread of high-quality teaching. The findings of this article imply that the quality of teaching, the allocation of instructional periods across subjects, and the classroom climates created by the U.S. teachers are not satisfactory at all.

The unbalanced instructional periods across subjects imply that our elementary teachers either ignore or are lack of confidence in teaching subjects such as science, math, and technology. Even within the relatively larger trunk of literacy instructional, teachers spend too much time in drill and basic teaching such as asking students to fill in blanks and doing multiple choices instead of helping students look for meanings within texts.

Prof. Calkins mentioned in the first-day keynote: "the access to a good teacher is the most likelihood that can increase children’s success." It seems that our teacher education and professional development are not influential and in-depth enough. I wonder how many schools are actually applying TC's literacy teaching approaches? what are the percentages in NYC and the nation at large? How to make this project be more widely accessed and how to revolutionize the teacher education programs in a large number of universities?

Furthermore, under this new digital age, to cater to students' needs for 21st-century skills, our literacy teaching should not be limited to traditional static texts. As Prof. Calkins argued, today's children are growing up in an age of blogs, wikis, videos, games, etc. We as teachers should keep ourselves updated to the changing outside world. Literacy teaching can happen with comic books (e.g., The Comic Book Project), Twitter (e.g., community writing contributed by thousands of children around the world), videos (e.g., use video conversation tool VoiceThread to make textual/video/audio/visual comments to a video story), classroom blogs and wikis, etc. We should know how to appropriately use technologies to bridge children's literacy learning and their 21st-century skills.

The Importance of Active Thinking in Reading

In today’s keynote, Ms. Stephanie Harvey talked about the importance of active thinking in reading. It reminds me of the keynote given by Prof. Calkins on the first day. She mentioned as teachers we need to explore our self-consciousness and be aware of our own reading preferences as well as when and why our learning levels reached sky high. The process of “pushing” students to have higher-level thinking is stressed in the teaching of reading. “Comprehension is an on-going process of involving thinking. It is the thinking that happens…all readers are developing readers,” Stephanie further mentioned.

A teacher at the beginning of the reading institute told me that she would prefer to ask students just read without putting down their ideas in the middle. She argued that when students started to write while reading, the writing would take for ever. Is that true? I wonder what questions the teacher might ask students before and after their reading, and what she might expect students to learn from their reading. Like Stephanie said today, even we as professional readers are often running our eyes across pages and often times need to go back to the previous pages. So, it is important to keep our young reader conscious and active in the reading process. After they learn envision (visualizing the texts in mind), prediction (predicting the incoming plots), connection (looking for the relationships among characters and chapters as well the connections between the book being read and books read before), interpretation (explaining their findings in the book, e.g., relationships, hidden plots behind conversations, features of characters, etc.), and critical thinking (recognizing the pressures around characters, social stigma on characters, marginalized aspects of the main story, etc.), they will be constantly thinking. The process of thinking while reading will further help improve their comprehension skills.

Keeping different strategies in mind and putting down ideas in the middle of reading, like the teacher said, may hinder students’ reading speed. However, as teachers, we need to think about the ultimate goals of teaching reading. Are we teaching students to merely understand the story plots? Are we teaching students to be speedy readers? Are we teaching students to be thinkers?

Students in China are used to filling blanks and doing multiple choices for reading comprehension after reading articles/books. The nationalized test-oriented instruction has caused many children losing the joys of reading. Furthermore, if a teacher wanted to punish a student, he/she would ask the students to read/write more. What a bad method that extra reading and writing has become painful punishment, instead of something fun and motivating! For teaching upper graders, one feasible way to adapt TC approaches to classrooms in China is, based on the nationally scripted curriculum, to develop topics related to the textbook. Maybe I can connect students’ book-club reading to the national curriculum. For example, when teaching a unit on traveling in foreign countries, we can gather books on foods, sceneries, festivals, people, etc. in other countries, and ask groups to read these books and come back to act as a tour guide to introduce the features they learned from the books… Meanwhile, reading strategies of envision, prediction, connection, critical thinking, etc. can be introduced regardless of the content we will be teaching.

Philosophically speaking, what is the essence of teaching? Teaching for interest? Teaching for motivation? Teaching for “proximal development”? Teaching for lifelong learning? All the strategies will serve for eventual realization of the essence(s) of teaching and learning that we believe in.

Book Club, Book Leveling System, and the Application in China

One of the methods to help children grow interests in reading is to set up book clubs. As introduced by the TC Reading and Writing Project, we can match students at about the same reading levels and with similar interested genres together. Members within the same book club can “monitor” and motivate each other’s reading. Book club members meet several times a week, discuss moments in the book that make them excited, touched, and passionate, and decide how many pages they will be reading in the next a couple of days. They also talk about their findings and understandings after applying certain strategies towards the book they are reading. Book club members are selected and matched first according to their reading levels. Reading levels, according to both Fountas & Pinnell and TC standards, ranges from A to Z which is mainly aiming at students from kindergarten to the 8^th grade. 8^th grader is expected to reach adult-level reading proficiency. To my knowledge based on a previous TC course in children’s literature and experiences in a number of public school classrooms in NYC, most teachers are familiar with the Fountas & Pinnell leveling system and their classroom books are leveled by this system. While many books are published with a labeled F&P level, TC’s book leveling standards are not in conflict with the F&P. TC’s standards further complement the F&P system with specific guidance about features of each level in vocabularies, sentence patterns, punctuations, grammar, story flow, picture flow, etc.

While I love the structure and strategies given by the Reading and Writing Project, I have been thinking that how I can apply these good methods to classrooms in China, a place without a recognized leveling system in teaching English. Textbook so far is the main formal resource in K-12 schools in China. Students learn English through reciting vocabularies and practicing pronunciations and textual conversations. Students in bigger cities like Beijing and Shanghai are fortunate to have more after-school resources, including after-school English drama club, CDs and software in English stories and plays, English movies, and TV and audio broadcasting devices. Given the facts that there is no leveling system so far, English/bilingual picture books in China are insufficient, and there is no custom of having a classroom library, what can I do there? Can I develop a leveling system for learners who are learning English as a second language in China? Can I promote the idea of having a national English leveling system in China and connecting it to all the English picture book in the market and to be developed in the future? Students in China now start to learn English from 1^st grade (while fifteen years ago students in my generation started to learn English from middle school), with at least one-hour instructional time per day. One possible and feasible way to apply the book-club idea in upper-grade classroom is that: first, establish a classroom library by utilizing English books at school and local university libraries; second, ask several students to manage the classroom library, collecting students’ requests for books and returning books to the libraries; third, match students with similar English reading levels (based on evaluation) and interested genres to book clubs; fourth, ask students take turns to lead their book clubs and produce weekly report to the teacher reporting their reading progresses, questions, and problems encountered; fifth, ask each book club to present what they have learned from their books to the class on a monthly basis; the last but not the least, ask parents to attend students’ monthly book-club presentations, or videotape students’ presentations and post the clips onto classroom web log on a monthly basis.

The process of teaching should be creative and differentiated. Even with limited resources, we can still make a difference. I am enthusiastic about applying and adapting the literacy teaching approaches I learned here to students in China in the near future.

The TC Structure of Teaching of Reading

The following map may give you an overview of the TC method of teaching of reading in upper grades (3rd-8th grade). More details are provided towards the language used with students. For example, students are addressed as "reader" in reading workshops, while they are addressed as "writer" in writing workshops. Teachers are required to use specific language to start a conference with students, for example, "what are you doing as a reader?", "what have you learned from this book so far as a reader?", etc.

You can move any part around on the map to view details.

Smilebox: A Tool for Online Publishing

I want to introduce Smilebox, which is a terrific tool for personalized online publishing. Compared with Sophie which I blogged about before, Smilebox has several differences: (1) the system can "intelligently" display the photos/videos within the electronic "book". You can upload all the photos and videos at a time, select the background, and then the system will generate a designed book for you. You can further adjust the design and add texts; (2) While Smilebox doesn't have the function of getting feedback from readers, it offers more publishing formats (e.g., online book, online album, e-card, etc.) with various background choices. It can also be sent out via email or posted onto blog.

You can take a tour by clicking the yellow bar on this page.



The website says that over six million people have downloaded the software. The software is free. The process of uploading/inserting videos, audios, and texts as well as linking to the web space makes personal publishing become more creative and promising.