The Great Thanksgiving Listen

StoryCorps is appealing to high school students and teachers to preserve the voices and stories of an entire generation of Americans over a single holiday weekend.


Learn more about the Great Thanksgiving Day Listen  It is an ambitious attempt to collect stories from around the country and across generations. That site has links to a downloadable pdf with lesson plans and suggestions for student discussion.

In addition, the main StoryCorps site suggests numerous Questions for student interviewers to use as well as links to many, many stories already recorded. Several print collections (such as Listening is an Act of Love) published by StoryCorps are available for checkout from the New Trier library.

Added 11/18: This morning, Geoffrey A. Fowler wrote about the StoryCorps project and App in The Wall Street Journal, "Make Family History with an App from StoryCorps."  He says, this is "about more than recording history.  It's about listening more intensely than our busy lives usually allow." Here is a short video as he explains how it works:

ALA on Best Web Sites for Teaching and Learning 2015

Last week the American Library Association released their Best Websites for Teaching and Learning 2015.   

Though I had heard of some (IFTTT, gooru, knowimania, etc.), I found plenty that were new to me and look forward to exploring them.  I was especially happy to several digital storyboarding ideas since we know that students struggle with outlining.  Here are all the categories:

• Media Sharing
  
• Digital Storytelling
  
• Manage & Organize
  
• Social Networking & Communication
  
• Content Resources
  
• Curriculum Collaboration
  

Note also that the ALA page (at the bottom) provides links to past recommendations from 2009 to 2014 so that readers have even more links to explore.

Learning about Explain Everything

About this ipad app (from their website): 

"Explain Everything is an easy-to-use design tool that lets you annotate, animate, and narrate explanations and presentations. You can create dynamic interactive lessons, activities, assessments, and tutorials using Explain Everything's flexible and integrated design. Use Explain Everything as an interactive whiteboard using the iPad2 video display. Explain Everything records on-screen drawing, annotation, object movement and captures audio via the iPad microphone. Import Photos, PDF, PPT, and Keynote from Dropbox, Evernote, Email, iPad photo roll and iPad2 camera. Export MP4 movie files, PNG image files, and share the .XPL project file with others for collaboration."

Mr. Vargas made a movie explaining an upcoming assignment using Explain Everything:


The audio portion is outstanding. Looking forward to trying it on my ipad.

Steve Dembo's Presentation on Storytelling with YouTube

One thing I learned was the definite difference between a "Mashup" and a "remix". The former combines two different pieces of content; the latter is a transformation of a single video with either a changed soundtrack to change the message or other editing which completely transforms the work.

Enjoy Dembo's Prezi:

Storytelling for the YouTube Generation on Prezi

By the way, all the good presenters were using Prezi!