"Willing to be disturbed"…Margaret Wheatley

Why do I need to learn Social studies?

This story is worth telling because every year students enter my classroom moaning “why does Social Studies have to be so boring and “I do not care what happened back then”.  I believe students need to understand the purpose of the content and have a sense of meaning (other than a required course to graduate). Their thinking must be disturbed. Today’s  students determine this country’s  future.  They posses  great power and most are unaware.

Voicebox.com was the tool for this project. I wanted each image to stand on its own with voice background resonating to make a connection to the image.  (I will remake the original with my own local photos).  I believe image selection is crucial for students to connect and  see themselves or someone they know.  Voice is added to each image as a separate recording therefore no messing with timing.  The recording needs to be “perfect” for each image only and therefore you never have to “redo” the entire audio track.  Several different voices can be used, an option for group projects,  for online or face to face courses.  There is a feature to draw on the images as well that I did not utilize.

Story telling can be (non)fiction, include different voices and perspectives and have many purposes which go beyond entertainment.  A story can communicate the obvious and the not so obvious. The hardest part of this story, for me, was coming up with the idea.  This is a project I need a great deal of time to mull over, and then collect or create images.  Ideally, I would shoot my own images which again requires more time. The projects I enjoyed the most utilized the author’s own photographs or video. Using voicebox.com to pull the project together was fairly quick and easy.  Therefore, as a class project, an extended period of time, to plan and collect, might be required.  There can be issues when many people are using the same app, at the same time, on the same system, and on one occasion, the site I was using (xtimeline) was unavailable for two days.

“Tell me a story about what you learned in Socials Studies 11 or Psychology 12 or Math this year?” Storytelling can be summative, formative, reflective, inspirational, informative…

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