Imagine the untold stories that could be hiding in a school building that was built in 1923. Our 5th grade students are working to uncover some of those students in a project called the Barrow Oral History Project. This project is funded through a grant from the Athens Area Community Foundation. The grant purchased 12 digital cameras and books about oral history and photography.
This week we kicked off our project with a session where students learned an overview of the whole project. Then, students were placed into four groups to rotate through 4 centers. These centers are the result of many collaborative meetings and emails to plan what students would need in order to take on a project of this size.
Ms. Biehl is leading a center exploring mounds and mounds of scrapbooks, artifacts, and loose photographs from Barrow’s history. Students are looking at how the school has changed over time and thinking of questions they might ask our interview guests. Students are also brainstorming ways that these scrapbooks and artifcacts might be shared with others. At the moment they are stored in a cabinet our of sight.
Ms. Mullins is working with students in the computer lab to explore oral history resources online. There are many great examples of oral histories that have already been done such as
Story Corps and the
Veterans’ history project from the Library of Congress. Students are also using this time to look at the oral history books that were purchased through the grant, and teachers are taking some of these books back to the classroom to read aloud.
Ms. Beshara is exploring interview etiquette and interview question development. She is using the question generator from the National Day of Listening as well as having students develop their own questions to pull from for their interviews.
I (Mr. Plemmons) am training students on how to use Audacity to record their interviews as mp3s. Students are interviewing one another in order to explore the software and walking though all of the steps to export the file to a shared folder. Students are also learning how to use the digital cameras to take photographs of their interviewee and upload their photos to another shared folder.
Our interviews will take place on March 16, 17, and 18th. Following these, the students will make final products that will be used to build a webpage of oral history from Barrow. I can’t wait to see what stories we uncover.
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Expect the Miraculous 
Wow, what a FANTASTIC project! Thanks so much to everyone at Barrow for all of the work that goes into providing great experiences like this for our kids.
Thanks, Glenn. This project has been so much fun and the excitement that the kids have is very contagious!