Of Aspirations: Student Dream Scenes

These are the aspirations of my sixth grade students. This is our Dream Scene project, which we used to do in webcomic form but have now moved into Google Slides (see my explanation of this shift at Middleweb). These are just one of four slides every student did, so I focused only on the telling […]

Webcomic: Dream Scene Mentor Text

My students are working on a start-of-the-year project known as a Dream Scene. They are envisioning some point in the future and thinking about a goal that they have to get there. In the past few years, we have created digital stories for dream scenes, but some technical issues (mostly, moving from PC to Mac […]

The Literacies of the Digital Dream Scene Project

During an upcoming keynote address for the Western Massachusetts Writing Project, I am going to be sharing out our Dream Scene digital storytelling project as an example of bringing media and technology into the classroom in a meaningful and powerful way, with writing still at the heart of what students are doing. I’ve been working […]

What Digital Dream Scenes Look Like

We’re now well into our first digital story project — Dream Scenes — and a few students are already finishing up. Some are still illustrating. That’s the nature of digital work, though. You need to be flexible about the pacing, and then set up hard deadlines so that even the slowpokes get the work done. […]

Dream Scenes, complete

The deadline for students to complete their Dream Scene digital story projects came yesterday and, with me shouting out “20 minutes” and “seven minutes” in my teacherly count-down mode, every single student (except one) finished up their projects on time. Phew. That’s about 80 digital stories, with me scrambling around on my flash drive to […]

Dream Scenes, Nearing Completion

Dream Scene: Vet from Mr. Hodgson on Vimeo. It seems like with every digital project, there comes a time when the teacher has to crack the whip and tell his young composers: the deadline looms, so stop chatting and get working. I made that statement yesterday, letting my sixth graders know that the end of […]

A glimpse of some Dream Scenes

My students are in the midst of recording their voices and completing the start-of-the-year Dream Scene digital story projects. They are doing a wonderful job with their aspirations and my emphasis has been on using their “voice” as part of the digital work. A common piece of advice from me to them: “The music is […]

Documenting Our Dreams and Aspirations

What we were making for the first few weeks of school. This Dream Scene project is a stalwart for me, as it fuses student engagement with technology, writing about aspirations and sparks lots of discussions about where they see themselves in the future. The arrows should move you along through this Flickr album. Peace (keep […]

A Few Dreams to Inspire Them …

My students are working on their Dream Scene projects (done in a webcomic space) and I am enjoying getting to know them a little better through their aspirations (Note: I am sharing two versions here — the flash version and then the image version.) Peace (in the dreams), Kevin