So… Abby Lublin, Beacon teacher / coach / poet, and her 10th grade English classes have completely their latest project — Soph Tales. It’s a spoken word story event captured online. I’ll let their words describe the project:

Everyone has a story to tell. Collectively, these stories reveal our humor, fears, and most importantly, perspectives. Understanding other people comes from listening to their stories. We’ve crafted narrative essays around themes, such as injuries, fights, birthdays, name-calling, identity, etc. We then shared, edited, re-wrote, and shared our best stories again. We molded these stories until we had the perfect blend of plot and detail. Connecting the sound and sight of words, we recorded our stories in our own voices.

I was able to sit in on some of the moments of the class when they were working on these stories, and it was wonderful to watch the kids collaborate, helping to write and edit on paper and then taking the written word and crafting them into oral stories — and then taking those oral stories and sharing them with an audience well beyond their classroom walls. Suffice to say, I think that this project is something that the kids will remember long after they leave Beacon.

And the thing is this — this kind of project shows the power of technology infusion into the classroom. With a couple of DAT recorders, a couple of iBooks, and a lot of "old fashioned" English class storytelling, Abby and her students created a living record of their lives, told well. I really do encourage folks to listen to the stories, they are great. These are the voices of fifteen and sixteen year old kids that you will hear, crafting their tales.

Congrats to all the storytellers and their teacher (who has always been one of my favorite storytellers.)