Flickr Digital storytelling

Tojásfestés, a photo by sikeri on Flickr.

Kids in today's classroom are different from the kids in the past century. They play computer games at home, they use Powerpoint at school, they even have their own iPADs , cell phones. So it is necessary to combine technology with story-telling.  According to The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling,  the digital story-telling is a kind of combination of the art of telling stories and a variety of multimedia, including graphs, audio, video and Web publishing.

However, it is a not an easy job to apply Digital Story-telling for teaching purposes.  First of all, teachers can create digital stories by themselves, to combine your teaching topic with a digital story is a great way to raise the students' interests and  concentration for your class.  Especially, when teachers have a difficult topic which is a challenge for your students to understand, digital story-telling is definitely a great choice.

Furthermore, digital story-telling can also be a powerful tool to encourage the students to create their own story.  Teachers can give the students several instruction classes about how to make a digital story by themselves. After the students have known how to create a digital story, it's time for them to practice.  Teachers can distribute the students as  a  couple of groups, and each of the group members has various role: collecting pictures, brainstorming, audio. This can be a great opportunity for the students to practice collaborative learning as well as a nice experience for technology practice.

Don't Trap Technology In Your Classroom

The name of the post on which I commented is Teachers Embrace Digital Learning Strategies, in the blog named Mind shift.I am interested in this post because the author lead me into deep thinking of how to choose the technology in the teaching and how to adopt it in to the real classroom. In fact this post was posted on February 6, according to the blogger this was the second annual Digital Learning Day, which is designated to bring attention to the benefits of technology for learning. In order to discuss the influence of technology and learning, the author first talked about seven golden rules of using technology in schools. It claimed that  technology was worthless without professional development; the most important thing is not the time and money spent on by those educators, but the ways to integrate technology creatively into educators' daily teaching practice in meaningful ways. Besides, the author mentioned that "teaching tools are not just a passing fad". Teachers should take the risks to exploring and experiencing the efficient teaching tools and try to keep learning on technology, being a lifelong learner.

Also the author linked a survey by PBS learning media, it is a survey about the teachers' ideas and suggestions about technology in the classroom. From the survey, it is clear that most of the teachers( almost 74% think that technology is a good teaching tool,  especially for those teachers in low-income schools.

The post also provides case studies of how teachers using technology to support learning.  Here some of the teacher use technology to playing the game with the students.  My favorite one is that a teacher using texts message  with the students.  Before each of the class,  the teacher ask the student to send him a message about one challenging question of the class.  The student who send the message first will get a chocolate as a prize. I think this is a great way to enhance the students' learning motivation.

I think all these tips are very helpful for my future class plan. It provides several efficient ways to improve both learning and teaching process. I may keep this blog in my teaching life as a good planing resource.