Fine Tech in the Classroom

I recently wrote a proposal to donorschoose.org to hopefully get funded the cost of 10 digital cameras.  My project will be called “Teach Me About My Past.”  I teach in Birmingham, which has a rich civil rights history, but many of those leaders of the 50’s and 60’s will no longer be with us.  I want my students to be able to talk and meet with the people and create a digital story about what they have learned.  Some will also have a choice of studying why the city was originally built where it is (iron ore, coal mines, etc.) 

This idea really came to me when I overheard a student in another teacher’s classroom who were doing black history month projects mention something.  She was so excited because she had talked with her aunt who mentioned that she had been alive when Martin Luther King, Jr. was alive.  Talk about making me feel old.  But this made me think about just how young they really are and how I have taken for granted the history that has happened during my lifetime - and I don’t consider myself that old:)

Other projects I would like to try in this same genre would be to interview the WWII vets.  They are quicky passing away and we are losing that oral history.