Ever since I listened to George Couros talking about Identity Day in the Reform Symposium, I’ve been pondering about the importance of helping our students develop a deeper sense of belonging, of finding their own passions and drives. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to make our learners’ inner voices bloom into more understanding of what truly makes them go beyond, do their best and look for ways to face their own personal challenges?
As I kept mulling over, I came up with a very simple classroom idea: to create an identity log throughout a period of time. Then use this log to create a digital artifact to represent who we are.
Transformative? Empowering, to say the least.
Every beginning or end of classes, the teacher would come up with a prompt. Students would use that prompt to freely write, doodle, draw for, let’s say, two or three minutes. After a certain period of time, students would look back at their identity logs and synthesize them on a digital artifact to represent themselves. It could be a video, a comic strip, an image, a mosaic, a slideshow to share with the other students.
Some prompt ideas for the Identity Log project:
What I like most about myself…
Every time I see…it makes me…because…
I daydream when…
My most special moment of the day is…
….is someone whom I cherish because…
No one could ever imagine that I…
Three things about my favorite hobby…
I am someone who can’t stand…
I am someone that loves…
Some of the digital tools the students could use for their digital production:
Prezi
Animoto
Glogster
Voicethread
Makebeliefscomix
And here’s an example of a “Who I am” series with some educators to inspire you to get started by trying out yourself and transforming your students’ perspectives about themselves, about who they are, what they are capable of with a very simple Identity Log activity.
About Carla on Prezi
by Luiz Cláudio
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