The Collaborative ABC Movie Project

“The Collaborative ABC Movie Project: Using Technology to tell Stories” by Bonnie and Kevin Hodgson

Kevin and Bonnie have quite a story to tell. Their collective project brought together people from all over the world with the same interests. In putting together an ABC movie with each person producing a “page” for their part of the book they have brought together people and stories within stories. In addition to this they have created for this conference a web page with a multitude of information on how this was created and reflections from many of the participants.

Now, how do I take from this and apply it to my own student lessons? The idea of an ABC book is not new, but a digital book is. An idea for me that has developed because of this podcast is to have the students create an ABC book using this same concept only scaled down considerably. As they did with this project, letters would be assigned randomly to students and they would then be responsible to think of a word or words that are associated with their letter. At first rather than giving them choices I would start with short (15 sec) video about their letters. Suggestions would be to video themselves, pictures, claymations or anything that would highlight their particular letter. I might have the 5^th grade students make a video of how that letter applies to 1^th grade and then share this with 1^st grade.

With each of the webcasts viewed there is an overriding theme of collaboration, community, and interaction with others. You don’t need to know the people to collaborate with them as pointed out in this workshop. Getting involved in a networked community that shares the same interests and desires as you do is also an overriding theme for Web 2.0. I appreciate the willingness of others to share their ideas and knowledge.