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:

StoryCorps provides an equipment guide for selecting the necessary tools to create a recording, but Seattle Public Schools teachers creating stories in the classroom can use a standard input mic and a podcast program like Audacity (PC) or Garageband (Mac) to record stories on a classroom computer.

Learn more about StoryCorps and hear how powerful and poignant stories can be:

Reflecting on your professional development experience is vital because it helps transfer new skills and knowledge into practice. It also reinforces your learning. It’s my belief there is an equally essential need for students to be more involved in reflecting on their own learning.

To focus on this belief, I have put together this training module to simulate an experience where teachers create an eScrapbook using their own learnings as content. I have been told by Teacher participants that this simulation can be easily adapted for students in the classroom. The idea is to help students synthesize and analyze in a technology rich learning environment.

Resources are listed below. I would love to hear how you have expanded on this idea and how you have adapted these templates to make them better.
Storyboard for Scrapbooking
Teacher Example:Targeting Process
Scrapbook of Reflections Handout

To read more information on this topic from author Annette Lamb click on this Link.

Here is a definition of what a WebQuest is from http://webquest.sdsu.edu/:

A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented activity in which most or all of the information used by learners is drawn from the Web. WebQuests are designed to use learners’ time well, to focus on using information rather than looking for it, and to support learners’ thinking at the levels of analysis, synthesis and evaluation.

What a valuable way for students to learn!

Site maintained by a school district that uses WebQuests as part of their technology integration.
http://www.milforded.org/teachers_rooms/wq.asp
From the Milford, Connecticut school district – WebQuests are written by teachers for teachers.

Activities for ESL Students
http://a4esl.org/
Quizzes, tests, exercises and puzzles to help students learn English as a Second Language.
This is a project of The Internet TESL Journal and has thousands of contributions by many teachers.

Dave’s ESL Cafe
http://www.eslcafe.com/
This site is maintained by Dave Sperling and contains lots of information for students and teachers.
Dave’s award-winning Web site gets over one million hits a month. He is a teacher and author, and lectures around the world about the Internet and ESL.

The Internet Public Library has a newspaper section of papers from around the world that might be useful in your classrooms.
http://www.ipl.org/div/news/
Most of the newspapers are in the language of the country.

The ESL Independent Study Lab
http://www.ipl.org/div/news/
This site is organized by skill area and language level.