Digital Storytelling at SBOC
Posted by Janice on April 6, 2009 in Content Areas, English Language Learners, Photo Story 3, Social Studies, Teacher Voices
What makes the Secondary Bilingual Orientation Center unique is their student body. Students who come to the SBOC are newcomers to the United States often with little English and limited formal academic skills. They also have varying social and life skills, which makes it difficult to cope with their new home in Seattle. In order to support them, and help them adjust here, it is important to know what they feel about their country of origin.
Lori Leberer, art and multimedia teacher, and Chuck Meding, technology teacher, have involved SBOC students in the Adobe Youth Voices program for the last two years. This program works with schools worldwide using the Adobe Premier products to achieve Adobe’s goal to help students create with purpose. The theme for SBOC student projects is, “I Am From…” Chuck Meding says, “Our goal is to demystify the power of the computer and to help our students communicate their stories to others. Digital story telling is powerful when simply done with pictures and student voices. Lots of our students are scared and lost when they come here, and getting their feelings out in video helps them tell all of us their story without worrying about language. It empowers them.” You can see that in the three student videos featured here.
Students stay with the SBOC from one to four semesters transitioning through three literacy levels and five math levels. Their greatest impediment is communicating in English. Telling their stories helps them grow in English communication skills as they work with teachers, volunteers and other students to get their stories to publication.
The Adobe Youth Voices program is designed to be finished in an academic year, but at the SBOC the projects must be finished in a semester (20 weeks), because the students who qualify to work with the Youth Voices program are the ones who will be transitioning out to other schools at semester breaks. This is a steep learning curve for students as they strive to tell their stories through pictures, sound and narration.
Here are three of their stories.
Rolando:
Claudia:
Jeong:
April 27th, 2009 at 8:14 am
Any chance these videos will become live? I use this blog in my ed tech course for pre-service teachers at Antioch and wanted to see how SBOC students conducted digital storytelling. Thanks. — Kurt
April 27th, 2009 at 9:43 am
Hi Kurt,
Glad you are finding the blog useful. The videos have been uploaded to Teacher Tube and they have recently changed their embeddable player. We will fix the embedded videos soon. Thanks for letting us know they weren’t working!
-LeAnn
April 27th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
The videos should be up and running now. I put in the new code. I hope your students are enjoying our blog, Kurt.