{"id":9113,"date":"2015-06-24T03:00:41","date_gmt":"2015-06-24T10:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/?p=9113"},"modified":"2017-04-18T16:17:49","modified_gmt":"2017-04-18T23:17:49","slug":"lrng-we-too-are-connecticut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/lrng-we-too-are-connecticut\/","title":{"rendered":"LRNG: We Too Are Connecticut"},"content":{"rendered":"

“I have never experienced anything like this before, and it was awesome—to get taken out of our bubble, and to expand my understanding of people that live less than ten minutes away from me. I’m so happy I was a part of this.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Students in southern Connecticut have been connected and inspired by the collaborative digital media project, We, Too, Are Connecticut<\/em>. Funded through a 2014 LRNG Innovation Challenge grant<\/a>, the project is inspired by Ubuntu, the African philosophical concept about a connected humanity that states, \u201cI can be me because of who we are together.\u201d Our individual experiences have power, but when shared, they have the ability to create a lasting and authentic representation of community and time.<\/p>\n

How does this relate to the modern classroom? With new digital spaces and platforms sprouting up continuously, there are now more ways than ever to document and share our individual experiences, though they remain largely siloed.<\/p>\n

A team of educators and students in Connecticut have imagined ways to bridge these communication and connectivity gaps with a \u201cDigital Ubuntu\u201d project that updates the concept to \u201cWe can be us, digitally<\/em>, because of how we compose together with 21st-century tools.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the course of a school year, 150 students from six diverse schools in southern Connecticut participated in an inter-district project where they created, for each other<\/em>, interest-driven, production-centered work based on their experiences to spur growth and richer understanding in the greater community. In its initial run this year, the project has already increased student interaction and broadened the audience for their work.<\/p>\n

Each of the participating schools, varying from high-performing magnet schools to high-needs schools, has taken on an aspect of the curriculum for the project, including lessons that teach digital scrapbooking, ethnography, and production skills for podcasting and presenting TedxTeen Talks<\/a>. Students created video blogs, radio plays, presentations, web pages, and maps to tackle issues of community stereotypes, social justice, or simply to share personal experiences.<\/p>\n

Take a look at a few of the works students put together in this We, Too, Are, Connecticut<\/em> project documentary\u00a0(created innovatively in the classroom of Shaun Mitchell, a teacher at Central High School):<\/p>\n