Digital Storytelling

Since NECC is just four weeks away and the deadline to get your impact of technology story celebrating ISTE’s 30th anniversary in, in time for this month’s drawing (an HP mini notebook or iPod touch, Flip video camera, and the ISTE book, Visual Arts Units for All Levels) deadline is May 31st, I thought it a good time for a little reminder. The grand prize will be a trip to NECC 2010 in Denver. You can see plenty of contributions already at the ISTE Vision website but might you not have some thoughts to add also? All submissions will be playing on special kiosks throughout the NECC convention center.

Graphic from ISTE’s site supporting your learning (and teaching) journey with a focus on digital citizenship.

The clock is winding down on this year’s Discovery Education and 3M Young Scientist Challenge. To add just a little more impetus to your students joining in or simply using digital storytelling to share what they know or care about in science, last year’s Young Scientist of the Year, Melissa Rey, will be doing a webinar Wednesday, May 13th. Whether you plan on throwing your hat in the ring or just want some ideas to get or keep your students interested in science, this should be an hour well spent with an exceptional young lady. Register here for the 1:00 PM EDT webinar.

FYI, just got this from the Center for Digital Storytelling:

Dear Friends of the Center for Digital Storytelling,

As we wrote last month, the 2nd International Day for Sharing Life Stories will take place this Saturday,  May 16th, 2009.

We are asking all of the folks on our mailing list to take 10 minutes this week to visit http://www.ausculti.org and join on our newly updated website.  Log in to add your name, information about your organization’s work, links about sites related to your work, or of general interest to our communities.

We have also built the site so that each point on the map can include a media story.  You will simply need to  copy the embed code from the story (as with Youtube videos) and paste it into your post on the site.

About the International Day

Began last year as an opportunity to celebrate and promote life stories, as well as a way to encourage critical thinking, cultural democratization and social transformation. The International Day is organized by The Museum of the Person International Network (Brazil, Portugal, USA and Canada) and the Center for Digital Storytelling (USA, Canada, Denmark, Czech Republic, Ireland and Portugal)

The chosen theme for this years’ Day is Journey for Justice – Migration and Refugees. The Human Rights Commission of U.N. estimates that there are currently 21 million refugees in the world. According to the International Organization for Migration, there are 200 million international immigrants all over the world. We want to hear the stories of people who have experienced migration in order to develop dialogue about this important matter in our societies and promote social change.

The day was chosen in part to honor Studs Terkel, the American writer, radio journalist and oral historian who passed away in October of last year.  Studs would have celebrated his 97th birthday this May 16.

Besides that, we could not leave aside the importance of any other person’s life stories. So, whatever your work with life stories is, join us!

The idea of the ausculti.org website is to show these stories and to promote a space for listening and exchanging experiences.

Post your stories, listen to other stories, and celebrate this day with us!

The deadline for your 5th-8th science students to get their video application in for the Discovery/3M Young Scientist Challenge is exactly 2 weeks away. In addition to the little pep talk from Will Smith on their main page, we’ve scheduled a webinar with ’08’s Young Scientist of the Year, Melissa Rey. You can get one last round of tips on how to polish that video entry and also hear from an extraordinary young lady who was tops in the nation last year. Register here for her May 13th webinar at 1:00 p.m. EDT and check out the four challenge topics that could make a difference around the house. Choose just one of them and make a video illustrating a solution to enter.

Don’t forget the Young Scientist Challenge. Watch his video on the website. Click on it as it cycles through or hit the #1 box.

Just 16 days and counting til the deadline for the Discovery Education & 3M Young Scientist Challenge 5th-8th grade video applications are due. The YSC site has a list of helpful links to presentations that Hall and I did specifically for this nation wide search. I haven’t seen any of this year’s entries yet but you can see, and your students can learn from, past young scientists in a couple of different ways:

   The Fall 2008 challenges at the Goddard Space Center.

And if you have a Discovery Education streaming account, log in and search on “young scientist challenge.” You will be able to view last year’s Science Channel special with the finalists and well as ’07’s show with the MythBusters along with a few other clips. I especially like “The Eye in Inspiration.”  And if you don’t have a streaming subscription yet, you might want to look into a free trial.

Also, the International Student Media Festival has opened it’s entry window. Your students have until May 31st (June 30th for International entries) to enter a project in a number of categories from still photos to websites to podcasts to videos just to name a few. P.S. there is a “request a deadline extension” link on their page but I have no idea what that policy is.