Classroom exercises

The Center for Digital Storytelling: The start of it all. Teachers should go to the cookbook, in particular:

Links to great digital storytelling sites.
By Newton Baker
Retired teacher

Six students (aged 11-13) and I recently set out with digital video and still cameras and notebooks to explore all of Montpelier’s bridges crossing our town’s three major rivers.

The point was to collect writing and visual images to combine in a final DVD that included text, music and voice-over. The students would write, photograph and edit the material and would make group decisions necessary to create their final product.

By Nick Brooks
Language Arts Teacher
Williston Central School

Sharing ourselves with others is, at its simplest level, a lesson in trust. When we meet new people, our thoughts and expressions are often guarded in the uncertainty of how others will feel and react to what we think and believe.

By Ed Darling
South Burlington High School, English teacher

I wish that as a high-school student I’d been assigned to write a reporter-at-large piece. That would have given me an opportunity to choose some place of business or other enterprise in my community to visit, write a report about it and make my report available for others to read. Many of my readers would have learned something from my report that they didn’t know, and a project like that would have enhanced my confidence as a writer.

This is an example of reporter-at-large writing techniques.
By Paul Mercurio

Have you ever gone more than a day without eating? Nobody wants to go without eating, and fortunately here in America most of us don't have to. There is plenty of food here in Burlington, and there are generous people who donate some to the poor. However, on Saturdays the Food Shelf and the Salvation Army have always been closed, and hungry people have been left without options.

By Elisabeth Arnold Siddle
Language Arts teacher, Milton Middle School
and Katri LaPointe
Business Technology teacher, Milton High School

By Natalie Brennan
Vermont Student Assistance Corporation

The personal essay is a perennial challenge for students and teachers, whether intended for an eighth-grade portfolio or the college application essay. It's a challenge for admissions officers, too.

As a resource, here are the prompts from 2005-06. You are free to send in entries from Vermont students for these prompts; please note the prompt at the top of the entry and mark them as "general." We'll publish the best of them.

By Newton Baker
Retired grade 4 teacher, Montpelier

"I am a writer."

Every student writer should be able to say that even while developing the skills and understanding of more experienced writers.

Novelist Howard Frank Mosher, a nationally known writer from Irasburg, offers these ideas to help you practice about creating a sense of place in your writing:

1. Do you have a favorite place that you like better than any other place in the world? A village, a deer camp, a room in your parents' or grandparents' house? Or maybe a trout stream or a mall or a soccer field or gym? Write a short essay describing your favorite place, using as many specific details as possible.