To Kill a Mockingbird Digital Curation Inspired by Amanda Lawrence


UPDATED 1/31/19

The November 2018 School Library Journal (SLJ) featured the article"Digital Curation of Classics: Instagram project helps students find relevance in To Kill a Mockingbird" by Amanda Lawrence.  Ms. Lawrence details a project she collaborated on with the freshman English teacher and piloted with ninth grade students. The project was designed to answer the age old questions "Why do I have to read this?" 

Ms. Lawrence granted me permission to discuss the article and share the resources I created for my students. Her response "Teamwork makes the dream work!" (I love my professional community!!)

While you can read more about the project in the SLJ article, briefly, Lawrence and her colleague asked students to create a thematic photo journal. The students selected a theme from To Kill a Mockingbird and connectedLee's work to present day. The students learned to use databases to explore and understand current events and to locate a present day primary source image. (I used this opportunity to talk about "fauxtography"). Students used Instagram as a platform to practice digital communication and curation and allowed for a much broader audience than a simple teacher grade.

You can access the resources I created for this project below. THANK YOU Amanda for sharing this awesome idea and being a great teammate!!





1/31/19 Update
We were surprised at how little students knew about current events. When we realized that we changed up our project a bit, by bringing in Time, The Week and The New York Times Upfront magazines. We discussed TKAM themes and we asked students to look for evidence related to these themes in the magazine articles. We let the browse for about 20 minutes and had them choose the news event FIRST and then find a primary source image to represent.  

We also learned that there was no way we were going to be able to utilize Instagram with student accounts so we are currently working on another way to publish student work...stay tuned!

Comments

  1. Thank you for sharing this wonderful work with us! I will try Matt Miller's template and direct students to use Google Slides as an Insta substitute.

    Link: http://ditchthattextbook.com/2018/08/22/using-google-slides-to-create-instagram-stories-in-class/

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