In 2006, North Eugene High School opened three new, rigorous small schools, including the Academy of Arts (AoA). The digital storytelling residency for teachers helped AoA faculty fine-tune a common vision for the school, and work as a group to use the problem solving skills they try to encourage in their students.
As a professional development technique, digital storytelling helped AoA teachers come together to define ways in which the school can better emphasize planning, rehearsal, production, assessment, performance and reflection to support student success across all disciplines. The high quality of students’ digital storytelling videos is proof of the teachers’ shared instructional leadership.
Teacher Video
Instructors: Fred Gorelick, Mary Holland, Gustavo Martinez-Padilla, Kelly McGhehey, Jesse Sherman
Participating teachers and administrators spent two days taping and assembling a short outreach video about their small school, its philosophy and design. This PD workshop models key aspects of a digital storytelling experience by asking teachers to take on the role of learners as they consider questions of audience, asset gathering, project planning and teaming while they assemble their own short video.
Student Spotlight Videos
Click below to view examples of exemplary student work. These products showcase how individual students and project teams responded to the digital storytelling design model, which incorporated familiar project-based learning criteria – the driving question, speaking and writing tasks, habits of mind, the notion of an authentic audience – as a framework for the project and the hands-on workshop.
Class Projects
Click below to view work of the participating classes to see how each project team responded to a prompting question around the notion of a shift in perspective: “Things were never the same after….”
