Educators and administrators talk a lot about student voice, but are we using the tools within our reach to redesign what student-publishing looks like in classrooms in order to empower every voice? One of my biggest goals as a Digital Learning Coach is to shift thinking away from printing as a primary method of publishing student work, particularly in the elementary setting. Considering a more comprehensive shared-definition of publishing as the process of making content public through distribution, it’s about time we expand the ways we encourage our students to show what they know in more engaging and meaningful ways.
Get free from the fridge and beyond the bulletin boards to capture a schoolwide, townwide, or worldwide audience. Creators at every level are expanding their audiences and amplifying their voices to showcase creativity. Let’s rethink our productivity that is limited to classroom-bound books, one-off worksheets, and even the prettiest printed posters.
We have the capacity to create and distribute content like never before. Even better, students become empowered to make their thinking visible, and we can assess understanding while capturing creativity. The audience is no longer limited to the parent who receives the product, or the teacher who corrects it. Innovative tools in the hands of talented teachers and motivated learners upgrade traditional publishing tasks from transactional to transformational.
While it’s critical to capture and celebrate every voice, empowerment includes ensuring that those voices are heard, and that their ideas matter. When classroom teachers find ways to showcase their students’ learning and creativity “beyond the bulletin board,” new voices emerge, and learners rise to meet their audience. Every learner needs to know that their voice, their opinion, and their understanding matter- and that it matters to more than just their classroom teacher.
The sample ideas below can be modified or adapted across content areas and grade levels. What they have in common is their purpose as digital learning ideas that are designed to capture and model process, showcase and archive products, share and spotlight performance, and explain and demonstrate practices.
These 15 lesson upgrades represent a shift in instructional design as much as they represent a shift in lesson objectives. Their success lies in the hands of skilled educators who can blend clear content objectives with innovative approaches to promote student content-creation and tools to showcase and share their products!
Capture Creativity
•Create a podcast or class blog to provide an audience for students. They create a space to share thoughts, opinions, and actual voices beyond the printed page.
•Upgrade the traditional imagined interviews with historical characters with a modern twist. Ask students to design instagram or twitter posts from the characters, or create text-conversations to bring the voices, choices, and historical timeline elements to life in a new way.
•Promote digital storytelling for students. From a Scratchjr story frame with first-graders to a middle school graphic novel template, or all the way up to epub novels for high school, students can choose new tools to discover and amplify their written voice further than ever before.
Publish with Purpose
•Post/share QR codes to student-created book reviews, book-talks, or author studies in classrooms, libraries, or hallways displays.
•Solicit movie, book, restaurant recommendations through video (Flip/Clips), audio (podcasts/posts) or digital compilations (Slides, Book Creator) to apply persuasive writing to an authentic audience.
•Create a year-end “I survived” assignment for students to create content as a guide for next-year’s/semester’s class
•Promote student-created commercials or public service announcements (PSA) to promote digital citizenship to lower grade as a school culture initiative or priority.
Beyond the Bulletin Board
•QR codes bring content to life through videos or attached content that demonstrates the creation of the items on the bulletin board, or extends learning by providing addition resources, instructions, or related information.
•Utilize building displays, hallway monitors, or even a laptop station to create publish/distribute student content in the forms of Slides, Infographics, digital billboards, or PSAs.
•Extend printed poetry to a virtual poets’ podcast or interactive Book Creator product that captures writing with accompanying audio or video performance.
•Amplify student art within a virtual gallery, with student-created tutorials and guided tours.
Promote Voice and Choice
•Design logos and infographics to integrate design thinking with content area response.
•Provide menus or choice boards to empower student choice and differentiate options.
•Host a blog/vlog/podcast to publish and promote student voice that is published and promoted across school channels or social media.
•Refresh traditional tri-fold assignments to integrate digital design, augment with recorded audio/video, and publish to families and communities in authentic real-life production tools like Adobe, Google Slides/Sites, PPT, BookCreator, even Seesaw.
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