Movies shape the world

In many ways, movies have given the world a certain insight or shown us different places around the world that we have never seen before. They may portray them the way the director wants them to be seen or the way that they are actually seen.

We can shape the way our movies are made with programs like Windows Movie Maker, iMovie, or any other video editing program. These can be used by both students and teachers to present a project to their classmates/peers in a way that both educates and entertains. TeacherTube presents an outlet for teachers and students to present their work without having to worry about inappropriate content popping up while searching for other videos.

If you do not have the correct file format for Movie Maker or iMovie, Movavi Video Converter is a helpful program to have. It allows you to convert video files to what you need them to be (i.e. .mov file to .wmv file). Music adds to your movie, and Freeplay Music is a great website to look for music that fits the feeling that you want to give to your audience.

Seven Elements and Weather Effects

Digital storytelling puts thought, consideration, and organization into play. Without a well-thought out, organized storyboard, you can't have an interesting and entertaining story. There are 7 elements that are important to digital storytelling:

- First is point of view, which is the perspective of the author. Living in Corpus Christi, we see many people with tans because of the heat that we get during the summer and the bright sun, but then the tan fades to a lighter color as it gets colder (unless you're the type that goes to a tanning salon regularly).

- The second element is a dramatic question, which will be answered at the end of the story. For my unit plan, it would be, "How does the weather affect how people on the other side of the world look or feel about each other?"

- Emotional content is the third element, which are serious issues that speak to us in a personal and powerful way. Pictures of people that live in areas of extreme or harsh weather conditions, like in Africa where the sun beats down on them or in the harsh cold of Russia where the cold winter is the longest season, would pull on the heartstrings of viewers.

- Fourth is the gift of your voice - a way to personalize the story to help the audience understand the context. My parents come from the Philippines. Although that country is close to the border, they have people with many different skin tones over there. The degree of tan on your skin divides you into classes and makes people believe that just because they have a certain skin tone, they are better or worse than someone else.

- The power of the soundtrack helps to keep the story going strong and supports the scenes that it is associated with. For my digital story, I will use music that will go along with the weather that is shown in the pictures or videos and lend emotional support to those scenes.

- Sixth is economy, which means using the right amount of information to keep your story balanced. Since this will be my first digital story, I'm not sure if I can accomplish this, but I will to the best of my ability without leaving too much out or putting too much into it.

- The final element is pacing. You don't want to go too fast or too slow with your story. If you go too fast, your viewers will not understand what is happening. If you go too slow, the story drags on and doesn't seem as interesting anymore. My story will spend enough time on each image or video and not drag on or have unnecessary information so that it will keep the viewer entertained and they will be chock full of knowledge by the end of the story.

My unit plan deals with the science of weather and how it affects how people look in different parts of the world. I hope I can step up to the challenge of making my digital story a success!

Digital Storytelling

Many people have their opinions and theories about digital storytelling and how it should be used. Teachers can use them to interact with their students or set up presentations for their students to watch/listen/comment on. Their students can do digital storytelling of their own and get comments back from their teachers, classmates, and other students and teachers from around the world. It lets them know that their work is appreciated everywhere and there are others that are interested in what they have to present. Interaction is the main focus of digital storytelling. Comments, whether through audio or text (VoiceThread) can be helpful and allow students to get feedback on their work.

Students and teachers can teach each other and learn about people that live in different areas of the world and how the weather in their area of the world affects their physical appearance and allows them to adapt and survive the climates that they live in. Some students may wonder why their skin tone is different than their friend's or someone else in their class, or where in the world their family may have come from. By studying geography and taking note of the different weather conditions in the world, students may understand why they all look different from the others in their class. Some students have thicker eyelids than others because of harsher weather conditions. Those people that had thicker eyelids, like Eskimos, adapted to their surroundings to protect their eyes and survive.

Some projects that students can do are with art. Students can use butcher paper or posterboard to draw out a person. Each student will be assigned a different country and some information about the weather conditions of that area. They will be told whether that area is hot or cold, how much sunlight they get during the year or day, and whether they have harsh winds or severe weather. They will then get Colors Like Me paint, put it into small cups, and use Q-tips to put dots and show the different amounts of melanin in the skin. For every country that has people with light-complexions, use the lighter colors of people paint. If they have darker complexions, put a few drops of darker colored paint and mix them together so that they can see the skin color of people from their assigned country.

This is an example of what students will have to do to complete this assignment.

Internet Resources

Who knew that students around the world would like to learn about students that lived somewhere else? It is extremely exciting to know that someone in a different country may or may not do the same things as you do or do them differently from the way you may do them. It is always fun to learn about others and see how their lives differ or are the same compared to our own.

There are several different resources that students could use on the internet to help them learn about other students or about their peers. They can work together using Wikis or Google Documents or collaborate through e-mail or instant messaging or even through VoIP. Several resources are at the fingertips of students and teachers if they just know how to find them.

Internet search engines would introduce a variety of sources needed for students and teachers to research more about different cultures and people around the world. Students’ learning will be enhanced by allowing them to look up information for themselves instead of having the teacher provide everything for them. Google is not always the best search engine for everyone’s needs. Super-Kids and Awesome Library are better search engines for students because they have appropriate information for students and inappropriate information will not pop up. Students need to know which search engines are student-friendly and are not likely to have inappropriate information or pop-up ads on there. They need to specify their search by putting quotation marks around their query, and put + to make it more specific and – to take out results that do not coincide with what you are looking for.

Internet research would allow students to develop a proper researching strategy so that it would be easier for them to look up information and find the specific websites that they are looking for. SchoolNet Global is a great website for students that want to learn about students in different areas of the world. They can learn about what those students eat and what they do in their everyday lives and see how they are similar or different from each other. A few search engines like Super-Kids and Awesome Library are available for students to search for information without having to worry about inappropriate information coming up.

Students will be able to pinpoint the subjects that they are looking for or blogging about with tagging and bookmarking web pages will allow them to go back to a favorite website or something that they had been looking for easily without going through the entire search process again. Certain tags might include the words “ocean,” “blue whale,” or “sea creatures” if someone did an assignment about whales or other sea creatures that live in the ocean. Students could bookmark that page if they would like to see it again or use it as a resource for one of their assignments. Students will need to pick out the words that best describe their blog or what they are talking about so that other students from different places may find their blog if they are researching the same subjects and learn from them and use them as a resource and vice versa. Bookmarking will allow students to find pages easily after they have already searched for them.

Students and teachers will be able to communicate with each other through e-mail to talk about assignments or projects that they are working on or are going to come up soon. Students should know that they should use their e-mail wisely and not respond to emails or open them from people they do not know. Teachers should make a list of students’ e-mail addresses so that they can send an e-mail to all of those students and tell those students his/her address so that they will know to expect e-mails from him/her.

Instant messaging would be an easier way for students and teachers to communicate to each other instead of e-mail because they will be talking to each other as if they were together in person, but with a computer screen and several miles between them (if at all). Those that are using instant messaging can converse with other people and if they need to, they can go back and see what the other person said if their memory fails them. This will enhance communication between students and teachers. AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and Windows Live/MSN messenger are common messaging tools that most students and teachers already use.

Teachers could go into chatrooms online with other teachers all at the same time to discuss different topics or how to interact with certain students. Students could use chats if they were in a group of 3 or more people to discuss their assignments or projects and develop ideas for them with live time. This is the same concept as instant messaging but with several people rather than just 2 people.

Surveys and opinion polls would allow students to see the perspective of other people and what they think or believe about a certain subject. They could use this information in their own assignments so that they can enhance their information and show what people really think about certain things like global warming or what is going on in other areas around the world.

Voice Over Internet Protocols (VoIP) like Skype can be used for students and teachers that would rather talk to each other than type out what they are saying to each other. They can also see each other face to face, in a matter of speaking, if they have a webcam so that they may view each other.

Blogs are a great way for students to interact with other students and teachers. They can blog about a subject and receive comments from their peers and teachers about it so that they may enhance their learning and be constructive with the feedback that they have received. They can also follow another student’s or teacher’s blog and do the same for them. Tagging would be beneficial to their blogs so that others may find it easily.

Wikis are helpful because everyone can edit that page if they have the password. They can also create information pages for other students and teachers by collaborating and putting all their work together on the same web page and do it on their own. Unlike GoogleDocs, however, you cannot edit the page while someone else is editing it or see who is editing it at that time.

Online collaborative resources like GoogleDocs are very important and helpful to use with students because it will allow them to work on an assignment at the same time without having to be in the same place at the same time. E-mailing each other back and forth with a new draft gets tiresome after awhile. GoogleDocs is a breath of fresh air since students and teachers can edit it wherever they are and see what another person has edited on it.

Images are a great way to enhance your assignments or projects because they add color and/or detail to your work. Peers will be able to see what you are referring to and enjoy your work because it becomes more interesting with the pictures that have been added onto it, as long as it has to do with the subject(s) at hand. Flickr is a great website to find pictures that are both colorful and imaginative and there are several pictures to look through on that website.

Two more cents to add to David Warlick's 2 cents

I love how David Warlick structures his blogs. As informative as they are, they are also extremely interesting and engaging to me. Questions or suggestions are added into his blog so that feedback may be received and he can have more material to blog about. This is how I would like to present blogging to my future students and colleagues.

Blogs are a great way to interact with students in your class or even students that live elsewhere in the country or in the world. Your students can set up their own blogs so that they may receive feedback from peers and even have a pen-pal of sorts from a different country. Feedback, whether it is good or bad, can be constructive to help students to better their assignment or project and enhance their learning experience.

Also, students find the internet to be more informative and interesting than just reading a textbook or a printed news source. He's right, even though he may be just joking around: having textbooks that are small enough to fit onto your cellphone screen may be the best way to grab the attention of today's students instead of killing trees and breaking the backs of our children with heavy books.

Inquiry/Project-based learning - Its importance in my unit plan

Imagine having to do an assignment for one of your classes about the ocean, its properties, and all the creatures that live in and around it. All you know about your assignment is what your teacher has told you without any further details than what is probably in your textbook.

Do you think that this would be quality teaching on the part of your teacher or quality learning on your part as the student? Personally, I don't think so.

With inquiry-based learning, a student could question the different types of oceans that there are and the different areas of the world that they are situated in, and how all of the creatures in that certain part of the world in that ocean live there and what that certain ocean has to offer the creatures that live in or around it. Why aren't there this certain type of shark in the Arctic Ocean but it is in the Pacific Ocean? Does the temperature of the water attract a certain sort of species that lives there or encourages certain types of plant life to grow there? Would a fish or plant from a warmer climate be able to survive in the cooler climate?

Students could test these different theories with project-based learning, which is a different kind of inquiry-based learning. Students could simulate different oceans with a program on the internet and the life-forms that live in or around them and see how they survive in that ocean as compared to a different ocean, or they could build an ocean habitat for themselves and watch what happens to certain plants or animals that have to survive in waters that are different than their natural habitats and how they flourish in their natural habitats.

This example has almost everything to do with my unit plan. This certain experiment can also be done with people. We can already see how that is happening by looking at all the immigrants that come from different countries to our own country, or by studying how we survive in countries or parts of the world that are different from our own. Why do you think that people live in different parts of the world? Look at the people around you and see how they flourish in that certain part of the world and what they use to keep themselves alive and make a living in their environment. What other factors like the weather of a certain area affect how people look? Do you know why it makes them look that way or how it helps them to survive in their environment? Also, after learning about all the people in and places in different parts of the world, where would you like to live, and why? Explain what qualities attracted you or what caught your interest while you were studying them.