Everyday Words

In my capacity as a MARTI trainer, I just got back from working with Joan Parker and a group of Oxford Hills Adult Education students on a new English class that focuses on personal stories. It is a diverse group with unique individuals who will be sharing, collaborating, and publishing in many ways, including online. Check out our fledgling Google website here.

Everyday Words

Family History in American History Maine Ed 09

by Sarah Sutter

Wiki of resources for the presentation Family History in American History by Mary Ellen Bell and Sarah Sutter at Maine Ed 09. Links to tools and ideas for creating oral history projects, a great interactive immigration map, ideas for using Google Maps collaboratively and more. The slide show is there, as is a link to the recorded presentation from the Spring MLTI Online Conference last May.

Shayna Malyata

On Thursday I had the pleasure of meeting and working awhile with Shayna Malyata of Lewiston Middle School. It became immediately clear that she believes in connecting personally with students and finding ways to engage them in the learning process. As part of her work, we spent a few minutes looking at iMovie. Shayna already had an educational purpose and raw footage available. She only desired a crash course in editing . . . which is what we did. In my line of work as an integrator, that sequence is ideal: Just-in-time learning with a reason in mind for using a tool. See Grappling's Technology & Learning Spectrum.

Check out the links below to some of Shayna's work:

Kavango Connection

Lewiston Middle School Civil Rights Team

Memoirs for Change: The Lewiston-Auburn Memoirs Project (LAMP)

Memoirs for Change

Storytellers for Peace

Sun Journal: "LMS Students Share Stories As They Write Memoirs"

Maine Local History Handbook

Interested in doing local/oral history with your students? Need a model to get you started? Check out Laura Richter's notebook for rich suggestions, templates and examples. This is a gem created in the MLTI Noteshare application and saved as web files. Laura is an expert in working with children in investigating local history as demonstrated at Our Town Skowhegan Maine.




Related Resources:

Oral History
Video Interviewing
Noteshare
iMovie Workshop
Maine Studies

A Day in the Lives . . .

Three things that continue to perplex me:

1. How many people there are who don't know how to copy/paste.

2. How many Maine citizens there are who are totally unaware of MARVEL.

and

3. How many who are still unaware of the powerful learning that is taking place at the Skowhegan Area Middle School using a project-based philosophy.

Recently Apple spent some time doing interviews and documenting the happenings at SAMS in order to create a video for their site. Check out this Skowhegan gem: Our Town Skowhegan Maine And this one: Archives. And don't forget this: Skowhegan Downtown Revitalization Project.

Additional information at MaineLearns

For still more information, email Laura Richter

Related Resources:

Video
Essential Questions
Digital Storytelling
Critical Thinking
Cooperative Learning
Process Skills
Inquiry Learning
Questioning
Constructivism