Tomorrow – We Try to Go Viral

For the third year, our high school cancels the regular schedule, in order to have a special event, Diversity Day. This day is student planned and organized with workshops centered around a particular theme. This year’s theme is centered around storytelling and pluralism. As was explained to me, what we are trying to ask studentis to examine stories of themselves and others that show our similarities and differences.  How do we learn about others if not through their stories: visual, oral, written, musical, etc.? Due to the economy, we were limited to the number of outside people/groups that we were […]

Digital Story Telling at North Shore

This is an article that I was asked to write which was sent to the parents and friends of the school: A students learning to write and speak has been one of the hallmarks of a North Shore education. Over the past fifty year, transmission of ideas has shifted to include more visual information, including pictures, images, movies, and videos. Over the past four years, we have made a concerted effort to develop a student’s visual literacy not only as a consumer, able to properly decode and interpret the information being consumed, but also as creators of new digital stories […]

Changes in GabCast’s Business Model Leaves Educators in the Lurch

On Monday, one of the language teachers, who has begun integrating cell phones into her curriculum, via Gabcast, reported that she had gotten a prompt saying that she could not record anymore audio without first paying. Knowing how this teacher has really used this service and being away from a computer to check, I assumed that her classes had exceeded the 200 Mb storage limit that her free account allowed. Then, this morning, I got an email from a second language teacher who shared that on March 1st, Gabcast changed their service. On the front page of their blog, they […]