This past Saturday morning I presented with Dawn Danker at the Oklahoma State School Board Association (OSSBA) annual conference in Oklahoma City about our statewide oral history and digital storytelling project, Celebrate Oklahoma Voices. Dawn and I put together a new presentation about our project that was better organized and simpler than sessions I’ve shared previously, and we posted our slides as a Google Presentation. We’re hoping other facilitators and participants in COV will use these slides for their own presentations about COV at upcoming Oklahoma educational conferences.
All our presentation resources are listed on PBworks. We used Contxts to share a free SMS business card (with links) for our session with attendees, as well as a PollEverywhere poll to assess participant perceptions of Facebook.
In addition to discussing the relevance of social and digital media and the specifics of our 2.5 day digital storytelling workshops for teachers, we shared three videos from the 415 now shared by Oklahoma educators and students in our online learning community.
This first video, “Standing Up While Sitting In,” includes interview video with Clara Luper, a pivotal leader in the civil rights movement in Oklahoma and an early advocate for non-violent sit-in protests as a method to combat segregation. In our discussion about the video during Saturday’s session, one of the attendees commented how “recent” videos like this demonstrate the struggle for civil rights truly was.
Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!
“Innocence Lost” is a powerful video about the 1995 bombing of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City, particularly because of the way it begins and the tone/mood which the introduction establishes. Although the video addresses a tragic time in Oklahoma and U.S. history, it succeeds in sharing a very positive and optimistic message because it focuses on the ways Oklahomans and our nation responded together to this tragedy.
Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!
“The Dirty Thirties” is one of my favorite videos from our COV learning community to share, not only because it demonstrates the power of learning about history from first-person, eye-witness testimonies, but also because it was created in-part using the cell-phone recording website Gcast.
Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!
Hopefully we motivated many of the school board members and school administrators in attendance at our session Saturday to bring the “Celebrate Oklahoma Voices” project to their local schools and community. One board member left the session saying, “We’ve GOT to get this in our town!” It’s often hard to measure the “success” of a conference presentation, but that energetic response suggested that we connected well with at least one attendee!
I’ll head to Kansas, Oklahoma, this week on Tuesday to lead our 14th COV workshop of the summer with teachers there in Kansas Public Schools. The work of Storychasers continues!
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