How to: showcase community interviews with digital tools

digital anthropologists

Meet the digital anthropologists of Cabot, Vermont

In fulfillment of their project-based learning research this past spring, this pair of middle school students decided to learn more about different regions of the U.S. by interviewing members of their small, rural Vermont town who had lived in those communities. They took the resulting interviews and embedded them in this Thinglink:

We recently had a chance to sit down with these students and get them to share how they pulled this amazing project together.

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Bring on the dancing zombies: the undead teach disaster preparedness at Lamoille HS

I know, I know. But let me get a show of hands: how many of you now have that song stuck in your heads?

You’re welcome.

whitneykaulbachWhitney Kaulbach is a social studies educator at Lamoille Union High School, and over on her blog, she’s written a compelling and well thought out post on how she used the zombie apocalypse with her students in a unit on disaster preparedness.

 

 

My quick assessment of success in teaching this unit: Students have developed a habit of paying attention to news events.  The impact of disaster became very real for some of our students following news events and the typhoon in the Philippines.  The idea of disaster preparedness was no longer focused on killing zombies but saving lives.

…Preparing for a zombie apocalypse is quite similar to surviving a typhoon. Access to 2 gallons of drinking water a day, food, shelter from exposure to elements become crucial to survival.

Lamoille Union High School is going 1:1 with iPads, and, moved by one student’s in-depth and compelling project response, Kaulbach writes, ” I can’t wait until this student receives her 1:1 iPad from our schoolwide initiative.  Think how much more depth and detail could be added if she had access to her document at all times instead of the limited time I accessed for her.”

We can’t wait either, and we love it when educators are visionaries!