First of all, School Train and Hannah-Fox Becomes a Better Person where both wonderful pieces of digital technology integrated into a classroom setting. But how do teachers assess such submissions? The bottom line will always be, it depends on your rubric. Is the piece relevant to what you asked for in your instructions, and did the child learn the concept, not simply dazzle the audience with flashy images?
In the case of School Train, which called for students to demonstrate their understanding of metaphors, I would say they did a superior job. There were several smaller metaphors woven into the larger train metaphor as well, including students as passengers or the cafeteria as the dining car. There were only a few distractions, such as the students making faces for prolonged periods of time, which had little or nothing do with the the topic. The integration of Spanish terms was a wonderful cultural bridge as well. In Fox Becomes a Better Person we see several further examples of culturally and value oriented material. The student clearly and succinctly demonstrates the use of southeast Alaskan native stories as a way to illustrate values. I was especially impressed by the credits (for pictures, music, and help) at the end. Only minor distractions were present (such as background noise) but given the age of the student I would ignore them. These would be pieces of academic success in my classroom.
epic2015 in my classroom
The futuristic film epic2015 predicts the future of media and large media companies over the next decade. It predicts the future of companies such as google and amazon combining to form googlezon, a company which effectively competes with microsoft to be the only monopoly on media, shutting out items such as newspapers or newsbroadcasts.
It's putting it lightly that these ideas and predictions will have only a minor effect on my classroom. As Dr. Ohler states it, "The future...is actually the present!". Universities around the globe are turning to digital textbooks, and several schools already require the construction of websites or online gradebooks. Email is becoming a popular tool for communication within schools, as well as to the community, parents, and students. Integrating items such as podcasts and blogs, though complicated for many of the "paper generation", are efficient and commonplace for many of todays students. To ignore media and technology is putting our students are a serious disadvantage for the modern world. Several items are available for stduents at my school, such as audio book downloads from ListenAlaska or the technology to post items on TeacherTube, Animal Diversity Web, or Blogger. As long as the technology remains free and available to schools, teachers need to use these items in their classrooms.
However......I believe that we cannot entirely sacrifice the natural world for a digital one. Students these days are suffering from what Richard Louv coined as "Nature Deficit Disorder". Agriculture is considered a blue collar job, and hence students don't' understand that spaghetti doesn't grow in the ground, eggs come from chickens, or the songbirds in their backyard winter in Argentina. That's my two cents as a environmental biologist. :)
Sabrina's Journey in my classroom
I believe Sabrina's Journey could be the basis of any number of media projects in your classroom. I would frame the idea of what students wanted to be their goals in life, incorporating pictures from their past, present, and 'found' items for the future. I would be clear to include in my rubric that students need to document their sources, use vocabulary words, and include certain aspects such as "What job(s) do I want?" or "What are my general financial goals?". In the science realm, as a semester wrap up, students could predict how some aspect of science we have studied would affect their future lives. Students should include the history of the unit (such as genetic engineering) and their predictions of how it will change their future.
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