Learning Curve

Trolling the DEN blogosphere, I found this SAT post on the NJ DEN blog, posted by Heather Sullivan. She states, and I wholeheartedly agree: “EVERYONE learns through stories. That’s why digital storytelling is such a powerful learning/teaching tool!” The idea comes from the people at BrainyFlix in the form of a contest that ends on March 16, 2009. Since, however, participation in this contest will create a Quarter 2 grade, your deadline falls much sooner: January 19, 2009. 

From the PA DEN blog by Jennifer Dorman, I am copying the BrainyFlix rationale and contest perks:

BrainyFlix is endeavoring to help students better prepare for the SATs through a mode of learning that research has proven to be very powerful for 21st century learners – video. Here is the contest overview:
We’re trying to help kids prepare for the SAT by offering fun and free videos about SAT vocabulary, made by YOU!

We’re offering $600 in prize money to the video that receives the most number of votes. $200 of the payout will go to the maker(s) of the video and $400 to the class or school club of his/her choice.

And to make this viral, we’ll give out 1 free iTunes download for every 5 videos you submit or referrals you provide. iTunes downloads available for first 1000 videos only.

Copied from Sullivan’s NJ DEN post:

So I checked out the contest details & it looks like a really fun and DO-ABLE digital storytelling project. Here are the basic contest rules:

* Make a video about any SAT/ACT vocabulary word of your choosing from this list. On that list, they show you how many videos have been submitted for each word. You are encouraged to choose one without any videos submissions.

* 1 video for 1 word, but you can make as many videos as you want.

* Anyone can enter the competition! Just remember that part of the prize money has to go to a U.S. high school or middle school of your choosing.

* All voting will happen at BrainyFlix.com, so make sure your video includes the following text: “Vote for this video at www.BrainyFlix.com/xxxxx”. And substitute the “xxxxx” with your vocab word.

* Important contest dates:
o Video submission opens: 1/1/2009 BUT OUR DEADLINE IS JANUARY 19, 2009
o Video submission ends: 3/16/2009
o Voting opens: 3/23/2009
o Voting ends: 4/5/2009
o Winners announced: 4/13/2009

The Word List is rich and organized alphabetically ( I had a hard time remembering what some of the words mean ) Here’s an example video that the contest coordinators, a group of MIT alumni, created:

BrainyFlix
PA DEN
NJ DEN
video
YouTube
digital storytelling
Turbo Tagger

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