Student Digital Project Models

Students have asked for examples of student multimedia history projects.
Find examples of student projects linked to Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary’s online poster, “Becoming Citizen Historians.”

I have written in the past about both Digital Storytelling and project based learning. The Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown University offers a portal to Digital Storytelling resources for teachers including three examples. The first, “Chocolate Innocence” is a good brief example of student media project.

National History Day offers 6-12th grade students opportunities to compete, much like a science fair, with research-based history papers, performances, exhibits, documentaries, and web sites. Take a look at this award winning 2007 collaborative middle school media project, “The Great Seattle Fire, Phoenix of the Northwest.”

For more ideas, read the National History Day guides and resources for producing both Documentaries and Web Sites. The judging guide and forms also provide a good check for the quality of your project. As you can see, the first NHD goal is to produce a high quality, research-based project. For future teachers, the Dayton Public Schools have participated in National History Day for the past six years – a model project may be a good item for your portfolio.

Please keep in mind that you may decide to use the WordPress platform itself and the skills that you learn from blogging to produce a digital exhibit for this project.

Course Design

In designing the course around student research, discovery, peer review and media production, I gave a lot of thought to ideas from a recent publication about the Visible Knowledge Project: Viet Nguyen “Multimedia as Composition: Research, Writing, and Creativity” as well as Peter Burkholder and Anne Cross, “Video Killed the Term Paper: Two Views.” I agree with Burkholder’s conclusions:

. . . having graded thousands of history papers, I am fully aware that students need help with their writing, and I firmly believe that papers have a central role to play in history courses. But this does not mean educators should shy away from building new paths to learning. . .

The first impetus for this approach to teaching came from following the Center for History and New Media’s Digital Campus podcasts and from reading a series of posts on “The End of Western Civilization as we Know It” from T. Mills Kelly’s blog Edwired.