CATE holds summer literacy institute
Project first in series using multimedia technologies to combat learning problems

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Services Editor

"City Voices, City Visions," a broad partnership involving UB, the Buffalo Public Schools and the community, is attacking the learning problems faced by Buffalo students by applying multimedia technologies in ways never used before.

The partnership's initial project-a Summer Technology/Literacy Institute-was held this summer, the first of what is expected to be an annual summer institute designed to instruct Buffalo teachers in how to use digital video technologies to improve literacy and social-studies learning.

The "City Voices, City Visions" curriculum teaches the use of multimedia technologies and reading/writing strategies to help schools meet state learning standards and to foster student achievement in innovative ways. The teachers attending the annual institute not only will use their new skills in the classroom, but also will become UB/Buffalo school district technology/literacy facilitators.

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Among the activities sponsored by the program are oral-history projects using multicultural literature, modeling successful academic writing and the production of community-based video documentaries and memoirs.

To help them do their jobs, each teacher participating in the first institute received a digital movie camera, and each two-teacher school team received an iMac computer loaded with iMOVIE software and a TV-VCR setup with software to translate analog video signals to digital signals.

Suzanne Miller, director of the summer institute and associate dean of the Graduate School of Education (GSE), says education research has proven that the innovative use of multimedia technology in schools can improve teaching and learning dramatically. All students benefit from the skilled use of critical technologies, with particularly impressive results among low-achieving students with literacy problems.

"Unfortunately," she says, "teachers in financially strained urban districts and under-funded schools-the very teachers who need help most-have few opportunities to learn the effective use of these technologies. Access to advanced technologies is severely limited, as is training in their wise use in literacy and subject-matter learning."

Miller says the summer institute provides teachers with a new means to help students learn in an inquiry-based (hands-on), learner-centered, project-oriented literacy curriculum.

This method, which involves video and written documentation of community-based experiences, has been shown to be very effective in spurring students on to pursue higher-level literacy and social studies learning, she adds.

While other such programs frequently target teachers in Buffalo's magnet high schools, the pilot institute focused instead on teachers from a grammar school, a vocational high school and two other non-magnet high schools.

The program, which ran from July 24 through Aug. 4, involved teams of one English teacher and one social-studies teacher from South Park, McKinley and Kensington high schools and from Black Rock Academy. The teachers were taught how to use the new i-MOVIE software from Macintosh, which they used to produce original videos about Buffalo, its schools, students and community issues.

The state-of-the-art software makes it easy to produce high-quality videos in very little time that are posted on the institute Web site, http://www.gse.buffalo.edu/org/cityvoices.

The training and equipment make it possible for the teachers to share immediately their new skills with middle-and high-school students, local teaching colleagues and teachers statewide through distance-learning events and Web-based, professional-development modules.

They also will help their students study and document their own communities through research, interviews, writing and recording on videotape. These activities will help students develop skills and strategies to assist them in meeting new higher-level state learning standards in literacy, social science and other school subjects.

The teachers' new skills also will be promulgated through the community-based UB/Buffalo School District Family Technology Clubs, in which parents and students will work collaboratively to analyze media and information, and use complex technologies to communicate family and community stories.

Using these stories, the "City Voices, City Visions" project team will create an Urban Images Digital Library that will be a rich resource for curriculum development, teacher development and research in urban education. The team also will publish selected stories on public-access digital television and through a Web site.

Miller says the ongoing project also will continue to foster collaborations between university faculty and groups of teachers, community members and future teachers through the GSE Collaborative Research Network. The network supports collaborative inquiries on improving teaching and learning through use of the "City Voices, City Visions" curricular projects and video products.

"As far as we know, the multimedia technology described has never before been used for the purposes outlined here," says Miller. "Our purpose is to build a strong, collaborative program to foster student achievement and enhance their prospects for success."

The project is co-sponsored by the Buffalo Public Schools and the GSE, the Urban Education Institute, the Collaborative Research Network and the Center for Applied Technologies in Education (CATE), all at UB. CATE, directed by Don Jacobs, is a program of the Division of Public Service and Urban Affairs that serves as a liaison between the university and the Buffalo Public Schools Technology Initiative.

UB faculty members involved in the "City Voices, City Visions" partnership are from the GSE and the departments of Media Study, History and American Studies, all in the College of Arts and Sciences, and from the Department of Library Studies in the School of Information Studies.