This week, we’re wrapping up our digital storytelling projects, sharing some inspiring mini-documentaries made by Michigan students, and digging into a free, must-have design tool for teachers.
Digital Storytelling Week 5
It’s the last week of our digital storytelling mini-unit! Now is the time to go back to your rubric and make sure students have had an opportunity to meet the basic requirements and demonstrate their mastery of whatever skills and knowledge you’re assessing. You can still make necessary adjustments before giving students one or two more work days and wrapping up the project. Hopefully they have some content that they’re proud of, that showcases their learning, and that they are willing to share!
The last step in any digital storytelling project – or any project-based learning experience – is delivering the project to an authentic audience. Whether that means a community screening, publishing the content on your classroom or district’s YouTube page, sharing finished content back with the folks that they featured or interviewed, or a day or two of watching and talking about the content in the classroom, now’s the time to get creative!
After all the projects have been shared, you and your students can reflect on the process. Give students a chance to provide you with some feedback so that you can plan for next year and send a note home, to your administrator, and to anyone else who would be interested so that they can be proud of your students with you.
Iconic Michigan Student Videos
The Iconic Michigan Teacher Fellowship is an annual program that we run to support Michigan educators who are interested in bringing digital storytelling into their classrooms. This week, we’re excited to watch this year’s newest creations! Educator fellows from all over the state guided their students to create projects about local businesses, family histories, school-based points of pride, and iconic places from students’ communities.
Summer Newsletter with Canva
Now that it’s June, we want to send you off with a resource that will continue to support your students even when they aren’t in your classroom anymore. We’ve created a Canva template for a resource collection you can personalize for your class. And we’ll show you how!
