Learning about Immigration and Family Heritage via Digital Storytelling

Digital storytelling projects can be a powerful way to help students connect not only with the historical facts and dates in the prescribed curriculum, but also connect with their own family histories in powerful ways which can make an impression which lasts a lifetime. Nancy Pratt is the district technology and instruction specialist in the Cave Creek Unified School District (Scottsdale, Arizona) and recently worked with 7th grade social studies teacher Jill Kratzke on an immigration unit. The culminating activity involved students creating digital stories which connected the immigration stories of their own families with their lives today. This is a superb example of an integrated digital storytelling project within the curriculum. Listen to this 5 min, 30 sec audio podcast of students reflecting on the project, what they learned, and how valuable they found it to use digital technologies in this way to connect with their own family history and heritage. Unlike some student projects, which can focus strictly on lower-level Bloom’s taxonomy facts, Nancy and Jill were careful to include a prompt to encourage students to make personal connections to the content in their digital stories as well. Their success comes through in these student reflections following the project.

Here are some of the quotations from the students, transcribed from this short podcast.

My last name means something now. Because of this digital storytelling [project], everyone else will know my story as well. So I am learning and teaching them my story as a son, grandson, somebody who is going to make a difference in life.

I thought the immigration project was awesome. I learned all about my family, my heritage. Even doing the soundtrack, it was amazing. I loved everything about it. I learned so much about my history… I learned things I never knew. I never knew I had a farm in Kansas until they told me! It’s amazing. Everyone else enjoyed it, I enjoyed it. We’re having the time of our life doing it with all the laptops and everything.

I thought the digital storytelling was a great way to express yourself and to see how other people have lived, and to create it on a technology / technical piece of equipment that we are all so lucky to have, these great inventions that a long time ago people didn’t have.

Learn more about this project by visiting the Cave Creek Unified School District’s “Classroom of the Month” website featuring this project by Jill Kratzke, Nancy Pratt, and their students. All 89 student-created digital stories are available on Mrs. Kratzke’s classroom website.

It is worth noting these projects were created on Apple laptops using the iLife multimedia productivity suite. As we consider how American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) educational funds will be spent in upcoming months, it is vital we focus on students CREATING, COMMUNICATING, AND COLLABORATING. Educational technologies can and should empower students to discover and share their voices safely on the global stage of the Internet. That is a primary focus of the statewide Celebrate Oklahoma Voices project in my state, and it is fantastic to see these projects from Arizona students in which they are learning these vital skills as well. If your school district or state is considering a 1:1 learning initiative for students and teachers, or even “just” a ubiquitous laptop project (involving laptops for checkout / on carts) be the first person to ask your school board members, “How will these laptops be utilized for digital storytelling? What is the professional development plan for teachers in our district to learn digital storytelling skills and strategies? How many certified teachers is the district going to hire to serve as instructional technology facilitators to assist other teachers with technology integration projects?” These questions are essential. Fantastic, integrated technology lessons like this one by Jill Kratzke and Nancy Pratt do not materialize out of thin air, by accident. They take place when dedicated, knowledgeable, professional educators conspire to take student learning to another level by collaborating and focusing on content CREATION, as Anderson and Krathwahl’s 2001 revision to Bloom’s Taxonomy encourages. For more on this, I commend New Zealand educator Andrew Church’s wiki project, “Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy.”

You can contact Jill via her classroom website. You can contact Nancy via her blog as well as on Twitter. Kudos to Jill and Nancy for sharing these EXCELLENT examples of integrated studies using technology and digital storytelling!

For a recent digital storytelling professional development story, see Kevin H’s post from today, “Reflections on Digital Storytelling with Teachers.” In the case of Kevin’s school, teachers are using PhotoStory3 instead of iLife for digital storytelling.

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