Be Creative

I was very impressed with the lab session we had on digital storytelling where we used Microsoft PowerPoint and PhotoStory to create e-books. For the PowerPoint presentation, I found that creating the action buttons and the voice recording was fun and for PhotoStory, I especially liked the creativity that we employed to let the digital pictures, that we took, tell a story.
Can you imagine the children’s excitement in using these tools and the sense of accomplishment they will experience in creating their own books? Yes, teachers this is what we want, students excited to learn. I think that these tools when used effectively will extract the untapped creativity that our students possess but are de-motivated to use because of the monotony of textbook and basal reader use.
The last vignette in the article, Stories about struggling readers and technology by Rebecca Anderson and Ernest Balajthy (p.542), provides an example of teachers use e-books to help struggling readers. The teacher in the story first used the Language Experience Approach as a scaffold for her students who were discouraged by the monotony of their curriculum. She did this by using a story that a struggling student was telling about his new toy, as the basis of his reading lesson.
She then brought the new twists of cooperative learning and technology into the activity by typing a draft of the story into a PowerPoint file. She worked with the student in editing and revising the story and then allowed the student to work with a group of other students who were illustrating their stories on computers. She hoped that the pictures he finds that could be pasted onto his story and to provide context clues for future reading lessons based on his new electronic storybook. Her intent was to make reading more engaging for him.
There are lots of other strategies that we can tweak with the technology to enhance learning. Be creative.

Reference:
Anderson, R., Balajthy, E.,(2009). Technology in literacy education: Stories about struggling readers and technology. The Reading Teacher.62(6). p.540-542