Digital Communications Class "Boots Up" at LFCDS

In Kate Starns’ English class, the oral book report has its place, but in her sixth-grade Digital Communications class, the report has a slightly different name — the book “trailer.”

Both contain the usual requirements of a book report — a summary of the novel and an insightful question or two to engage one’s audience — but only one looks like it might be the kind of preview one sees before the main feature at the local movie theatre.

“It’s still the same assignment — we’re just teaching the students tools to communicate it in a different way,” said Starns, who, with fellow English teachers Jeff Miller and Marcia Mann, are teaching the first year of a Digital Communications course at .

The curriculum is taught to sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade classes at LFCDS, with each student taking the course either in the fall or spring semester of the school year.

The Digital Communications curriculum coincides with the first year of the School’s ePAL (Electronic Portable Anytime Learning) program, which was introduced this school year. Through the ePAL initiative, every fifth- through eighth-grade student in the Upper School is provided with his/her own tablet PC.

“When the ePAL program was being researched and developed, it was obvious that it was going to change how we taught our English curriculum,” said Marcia Mann, eighth-grade English teacher and co-chair (along with Starns) of the English Department at LFCDS. “We started to look for a way that we could really meld certain pieces of our current curriculum with the technology that we were going to have at our fingertips.”

There also happened to be a free period that needed to be filled as part of the School’s Fine Arts schedule rotation in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, and to that end, the Digital Curriculum class debuted.

The coursework for the class focuses on different projects depending on grade level. In addition to the book trailers, students in Starns’ class learn e-mail etiquette and the difference between sending personal and business correspondence. Starns’ students have also joined the blogging world, each creating a blog that is securely and privately hosted on the LFCDS web portal.

“I wanted to include a bit about blogging as that’s how much of the information in the world is being conveyed,” Starns said. “I’ve told my students that there’s a good chance they might have to write or update a blog for a company they work for in the future.”

In the seventh- and eighth-grade classes, students are being taught many of the same lessons as the sixth grade with a few adjustments. Students in Jeff Miller’s seventh-grade class are learning a number of computer programs, such as Photoshop Elements, a photo editing program, and eDesign, a desktop publishing software.

Mann’s eighth-grade students are learning proper protocol for digital business correspondence, as well as how these protocols will continue to change as they go into the business world.

“I have stressed that while they might think of email correspondence as informal — like text messaging — it has replaced pen and paper communications in virtually every way,” Mann said. “We’ve spent a lot of time talking about the tone of an email, and how to get your point across efficiently.”

Because the curriculum is very similar across the three grade levels, this year’s sixth-grade class is already at the same level as this year’s seventh and eighth grades. In an effort not to teach skills that have already been mastered, the curriculum is being restructured for the 2012-2013 school year.

Beginning next year, the sixth-grade Digital Communications class will serve as a training class, with the following two years of the curriculum focused on using the knowledge the students have gained and applying it to work on one of LFCDS’s student publications.

“In the past, we’ve struggled to fit things like yearbook, newspaper, and literary magazine work into the students’ schedules,” Mann said. “With the restructured curriculum, class time can be used to teach students more advance methods of communication, with a tangible product to show for it.”

“The students of this generation are no strangers to technology. They’re used to seeing stories being conveyed in a digital format,” Miller says. “Through this course, they’re being taught how to use the technology to convey mood and tone, and in turn, they’re being taught to convey their own stories in a different way.”

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