Digital Nativity

I was in the plane today travelling to Ottawa multi-tasking: listening to the It’s Elementary Ed Tech Talk podcast and trying to settle my two year old daughter into a much needed nap. The discussion was about getting kindergarten students to blog. The teacher was saying that the students found the wand microphones intimidating and that headphones with a microphone worked better. Another participant suggested using an mp3 player as a voice recorder.

I thought that using an mp3 player as a portable voice recorder was a great idea - but not just for class. Last Thrusday our grade 7’s went on a field trip to the Calgary Zoo. I’d been there the week before with my sister-in-law, her boyfirend and my daughter while my wife and son were in Saskatoon at a wedding. We had a great day at the zoo; we went in the late afternoon and the animals were all active. Plus there were a couple of very cute babies. I enjoyed that trip to the zoo more than any other I had been on for years. I came home really excited about having seen the animals. What if our grade 7’s could have the ability to record their thoughts and feelings at the moment they were most vivid? With mp3 players, students could record what they saw easily at the same time as it was happening: not the worksheet kind of recording, where they jot down details, writing on each other’s backs or copying information over lunch, but personal reflections and realizations as they happened.

So my first idea was to put together a kit of 4 mp3 players that work as voice recorders and 4 older digital cameras (2-3 mega-pixel, but capable of recording small videos clips) that could accompany students on field trips. Teachers could assign specific observations or reflections in different places (visit the lions - observe them for 3 minutes - make a recording that describes the time of day, the climatic conditions and their behaviour, or take a photo of the machine that prints the newspapers). Students could return to school and prepare multimedia reports or presentations of their field experiences.

I was lying in bed, thinking of this and how I might get the school to come up with the money to put it together. I got to imagining where else we might go. Not far from us is Head-Smashed-in-Buffalo-Jump - the colourfully names site where first nations people would hunt by herding buffaloes over the edge of a cliff . Then the next step in this idea came to me: I’d like my students to be the field reporters for a group of students who cannot get to a place like Head-Smashed-in.

Students from somewhere far away who were also studying Native American Cultures could prepare for the field trip with us and help to create a list of questions and goals to pursue at the site. We would take these to the site an be the field research team, recording the site guided by the larger group’s curiosities. After our visit, we’d prepare a report on the trip and meet up again online with the distant school to discuss what we learned, what was clear and what was still puzzling.

Has anyone done this?