May 2008 — 21st-Century Classroom
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Show and Tell
Students are using cutting-edge visual technologies to bring the age-old art of storytelling from the spoken and written tradition into the digital age.
BRIAN CROSBY'S 27 students at Agnes Risley Elementary
School in Sparks, NV, announce themselves with
this banner at the top of their blog: "We are a fifth-grade
class that is piloting a 1-to-1 laptop program using iBook
computers. We blog, Skype, make wiki pages, [and] produce
digital videos, podcasts, and vidcasts."
That's a lot to take on, and not what you might expect of a class in which four out of five students do not speak English at home and 90 percent receive federally funded free or reduced-price lunches-a group that can be easily categorized as at-risk kids. But Crosby, their innovative teacher, believes his students are more than just a demographic sample: They demonstrate the powerful educational utility of digital storytelling.
As piloters of the school's 1-to-1 program, Crosby's students each have an Apple iBook, which Crosby was able to equip them with after the school purchased a fresh supply of computers. With the laptops, Crosby has turned his kids into active bloggers. "We concentrate on language because most of them are not fluent in their native language or in English," Crosby says. "In order to blog, you have to stop and think about what you're going to say before you say it."
Blogging has brought Crosby's class in touch with students in such wide-ranging locations as Thailand, Canada, and Florida, and this year the technology was used for a collaborative storytelling project with a fifth-grade class in Long Island, NY. Pairs of Crosby's students joined with pairs of kids in the Long Island class to write a story based on one of the 14 drawings in the picture book The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. The students used Google Docs to expand on and edit each other's work in real time, and VoIP provider Skype to work together by videoconference, brainstorming face-to-face about setting, character, plot, word choice-all the components of a story. (The completed works are posted here.)
Crosby encourages his students to employ technologies at their disposal to tell stories in meaningful ways. He started with this same group last year as fourth-graders, and he will stay with them again next year in grade 6. His role has been as a facilitator, helping with the creative process. "As they become sixth-graders," he says, "I will be stepping back to let them continue to develop storytelling strategies for themselves."
