Sultan Bazaar

Sultan Bazaar School Final Videos

Twenty-four hours and several Bollywood films after leaving Hyderabad, Ilana and I landed safely at JFK airport in New York City today. We still have lots to write about our final weeks in India, though, so you’ll keep hearing from us here. One important thing we have to share are our students’ wonderful final projects! The first batch comes from our pilot program at Sultan Bazaar Government Girls High School, in collaboration with the American India Foundation.

Our class at Sultan Bazaar involved small groups of teachers and students working together to learn digital technology skills and create multimedia projects that could enhance their learning/teaching experiences in regular curriculum subjects. As you will see in the videos below, this format proved to be an effective and accessible way to introduce such digital tools to participants unfamiliar with cameras or computers.

Ilana and I are excited to have been part of developing this model in TMS’s work and truly looking forward to see how TMS builds on our work in the next year. For now, enjoy this first series of curriculum-focused projects created by TMS students!

Cotton Project from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

 

Natural Resources Project from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

 

Triangle Project from The Modern Story on Vimeo.


“I” is for India: An update from Tamil Nadu

While Ilana dealt with the uncertainties of AP’s Telangana situation, I’ve stayed on in Tamil Nadu to conduct TMS workshops at Communities Rising. Last week I worked with teachers from CR’s after-school program for village youth. They are creating a video that discourages the use of corporal punishment in education, which will become a teaching tool for CR staff trainings, as well as a great Tamil-language resource for other organizations. Expect to see a subtitled version in the next few days!

This week I am conducting two three-day workshops with 4th to 8th standard students in CR’s after-school programs. Inspired by the success Ilana and I have had in our curriculum-focused Sultan Bazaar classes, I’ve designed photo and video activities in which the kids reinforce their English lessons through learning multimedia skills. The teachers to whom I introduced digital storytelling last week are a great help in organizing these activities.

Today I held my first session with forty 4th and 5th standard students. After a quick name game with the younger crew, Siva–CR’s Periathachoor computer teacher–and I demonstrated how still cameras work. The 4th and 5th class students each practiced taking group shots, using TMS’s “3-S” tip of straight-steady-smooth. Then it was time for their break while the older bunch rolled in. Again Siva and I explained the parts of a digital camera and how it works, this time to twenty-five 6th to 8th standard students. We also demonstrated the use of a Flip video camera and tripod before they ended for and distribution of snacks and brand new Communities Rising backpacks. Tomorrow the older kids will get the chance to be more hands-on, but one particularly eager student, Androos, hung around and tested out the Flip camera after getting his goodies. The rest of them shook my hand at least seventeen times each (as Indian kids are wont to do) before heading out the gate.

The students gaze curiously into the lens as I explain how the shutter works.

Next the 4th and 5th graders returned for their second session, which is typically English class. We divided them into 3 groups, with one adult per group. I passed out pages showing alphabet letters to the groups, so that each group had eight or nine letters. They were supposed to go around the schoolyard, identifying and writing down things they saw that began with those letters. With the sun setting, this ambulatory activity descended into a bit of chaos, but by the time we reigned them in for closing, the groups had a list for almost every letter, and the kids were excited to take pictures of those objects tomorrow to create their own photo alphabet!

Group shot captured by one of the students during camera practice.


Works in Progress: Sultan Bazaar

It’s hard to believe Ilana and I have already had six classes at our Sultan Bazaar workshop! The teachers and students have made quick progress. Last week they completed storyboards, production plans and scripts.

Sultan Bazaar Government Girls School

Class storyboard practice (Photo by Kara)

Sultan Bazaar Government Girls School

The natural resources group hashes out a production plan based on their storyboard (Photo by Kara)

After two 1.5-hour production sessions this week, the groups are nearly finished filming and photographing for their curriculum-based multimedia projects. This workshop is operating on a low-budget model using two Canon Powershot cameras, one Flip HD video camera, and a tripod. Below are some highlighted photos by each of the groups. Click on the project title to view the rest of their photos in TMS’s Flickr photostream.

Cotton

Cotton Plant

Cotton Plant

Sari Shop

Triangles

Visualizing Triangles

Visualizing Triangles

Visualizing Triangles

Natural Resources

Natural Resources

Natural Resources

Natural Resources

Now that they have their project content, it’s time to teach editing skills. We’ll use Windows Live Movie Maker in the Digital Equalizer computer lab that AIF installed at the school. I’ve already been impressed with the girls adeptness at uploading photos and video, so I have high hopes for the strength of their final projects!


Playing with Bubbles

TMS’s new workshop at the Sultan Bazaar school is different from our other classes because we are working with students and teachers on projects that will relate directly to regular class subjects. This model will serve TMS’s goals of better integrating the multimedia tools we teach into the government curriculum and providing skills that can be used even when the fellows are not present to facilitate. Even as I teach the value of multimedia lesson planning, I too am learning its usefulness. For instance, showing the Sultan Bazaar participants the short video (see last post) that I made with their photos and videos was an effective way to review the skills and tips they’d learned in the previous session.

And with our Railway and APRS classes, I’ve seen students equally engaged in sessions where they’re using existing media as thinking tool as when they are doing hands-on work. On Thursday, when we wanted to draw out more of the Railway girls’ thoughts about women, Ilana proposed that we start by showing a series of 10 photos of women and asking the girls to write three words that came to mind when they looked at the images. The activity blossomed from a run-of-the-mill brainstorm to a discussion about the ways that photographers influence their viewers. Having these sorts of conversations with our students is squeezing a drop of soap into their minds: as everyone shares ideas and encouragement, I get to watch that drop balloon outward in a bubble that expands and expands until…pop! The students’ usual hesitations and decorum is thrown to the wind as a new idea or question bursts out and they can’t contain their excitement to speak up. Seeing these mini mind-explosions occurring all over a sea of thirty students is one of the things I enjoy most about being in the classroom. After all, who doesn’t love playing with bubbles?