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October 1, 1998
Bringing Literature to Life
by Renee Ramig
Starting at a new school, St. Leonard School in Fremont, California, as
its new technology coordinator, I wanted to really work at making technology useful to not
only myself and the students but also the classroom teachers. I wanted to find something
that would excite the classroom teachers so that they would want to integrate technology
into their lessons. I work with the staff here to help them make the transition from the
"computer teacher uses technology" model to the "technology is a part of my
teaching, my lesson planning, and my day" model.
I started with middle school. I asked the language arts teacher what her
favorite books were for the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. She said that Tom
Sawyer, Old Yeller, and Romeo and Julietwere her favorites. I
designed projects around those books. The students used Kid Pix and Printshop and included
elements such as animation and voice recordings to create a video presentation.
We started with Old Yeller. Each student was assigned to a
group of four students. Each group was given a topic related to the book, such as
women’s roles, men’s roles, food, housing, and so on. Each person in the group
decided what they wanted to do relating to their topic. Then each student completed a
storyboard with a hand sketch of their idea and wrote down two to three paragraphs to
record. Each student drew their picture and recorded their information using Kid Pix
Studio. (On a technical note, recording is limited to 32 seconds in Kid Pix. To get around
this, I had the students save their finished pictures three times, name it "their
name, picture one," "their name, picture two," etc. Then they recorded one
paragraph per picture. When the pictures are put into a slideshow, it looks like a single
picture with a long recording.)
I put it all together and transferred it to videotape. I kept the group
information together, and some students even had time to make an introductory slide for
their group’s section on the final video. This project took only two lab periods,
because everything except the technology part was done in their regular classroom.
I asked the language arts teacher to watch the final product. She was so
impressed that she immediately started working with me on projects for other books,
including Romeo and Juliet(for which they used actual quotes from the book) and Junglebook
(where they included animation with their recordings). She shared her excitement with the
other classroom teachers. Now those teachers are coming to me asking to do projects, too.
Even the principal has gotten involved by giving me 18 hours of scheduled inservice time
to train teachers next year.
Email: Renee Ramig
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