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Learning on other channels
July 27, 2007
Marco Torres is known informally as "the Rachel Ray of video."
She gets us to want to cook better. He to gets us to want to communicate better.
I first saw social studies teacher
Marco Torres last year, when he keynoted at the
BLC conference. His passion and his examples of student work grabbed a very crowded auditorium.
Marco teaches the language of media. He teaches effective communication. He wants his students to be able to use media to tell their stories and to get their voices heard. We know the grammatical rules for how to write effectively, we need to learn new grammatical rules for new media.
At that keynote last year, Marco shared student work that is gathered at the San Fernando Education Technology Team's (SFETT)
iCANN Film Festival.
"iCan" is a short film festival produced by students from San Fernando, CA, USA. The movies are projects for school assignments as well as projects for community building. Digital storytelling is our way of promoting the arts, celebrating our culture, and improving our communications with you: the world.
Over the past year, I've used these projects as models of effective communication and shared them aggressively with both students and teachers. Marco's students' PSAs, their political expressions, their powerful stories of family and community, continue to inspire my work at Springfield.
Note: If you have anything to do with student projects, you MUST spend time exploring this rich archive.
Like Marco, I am convinced that learners need to find the best channel for their communication efforts. In a world where media is so easily created and shared, video storytelling is one of our students' favorite and most effective channels for getting their voices heard. We can help them hone those voices and find authentic audience--audience far bigger and far more relevant than their teachers' eyes alone. See
Digital Students @ Analog Schools to better understand this.
At this year's BLC Conference, Marco brought his students. Marco's students shared their enthusiasm for their learning and for the global audience they now enjoy. They spent much of the conference interviewing, videotaping
, helping others videotape, and documenting the conference with their work. You can see examples of this video and others shot around the country in
Marco's cine de la gente.
During one session I attended, students shared strategies for exploring some new literacies of the 21st century, the language of film and making sense. They shared what we can learn by studying video and how we can learn by producing video.
At
FlickSchool, in true 2.0 spirit, Marco and his students share new knowledge, the strategies they themselve have mastered for improving communication using still and video photography. (Click on Podcasts at the top right.) I know these lessons will improve my efforts next year.
Among the useful enhanced podcasts are:
Now, these videos deal a lot with the
hows of media. But it is important to remember one thought Marco left us with at the end of the session:
For the most part, the kids can figure out the hows, but if we as teachers are not their Yodas, they will never figure out the whys.
Posted by Joyce Valenza on July 27, 2007 | Comments (0)
