Digital Arts Service Corps - youth development

Youth Development

Colleen Kelly — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 16:38:58 +0000

Tips for Teaching

There are many methods and approaches but the ones that work best are youth-centered and hands-on. On subsequent pages are several methods and approaches for planning and getting started with your DAY program, including project-based learning, portfolios, after school and in-school activities. Also, creating the space (DAY studio) is important, as well as developing the actual activities for your program. Upon request are some great lessons for teaching digital art (on CD).

Digital Art Youth Program (DAY)

In 2000, three community-based technology centers across the country launched "ArtTech", a five-week summer program that introduced youth to multimedia. Soon after the project was renamed the Digital Art Youth Program or DAY. Nettrice Gaskins created a resource guide for practitioners that was made available upon request. She also ran a local DAY program at the Boston Neighborhood Network from 2001-2004, with the help of an AmeriCorps VISTA (Derek Hixon). The Boston program served nearly a hundred local youth between the ages of 13 and 18. Additionally, Nettrice worked with a public high school in Dorchester to create school-based curriculum for teachers and students.

Creating the DAY resource guide has been a labor of love for Nettrice (she did not profit from it). For more information about the guide visit the DAY web site.

Computer Animation

In 2005, Nettrice taught three computer animation classes at the Massachusetts College of Art. Two of the classes were for 12-18 year olds and the other was for high school students. For these classes Nettrice developed a web site and curriculum. The activities culminated in a CD/DVD and screening of youth work. The work can also be seen on the web here: Digital Media Channel.

Youth Entrepreneurship

Wikipedia defines entrepreneurship as "the practice of starting new organizations, particularly new businesses generally in response to identified opportunities."

Organizations such as National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship have the mission "to teach entrepreneurship to young people from low-income communities to enhance their economic productivity by improving their business, academic and life skills."

One of CTC VISTA Project's participants, The Young Entrepreneurs Society (YES), has a mission of "North Quabbin/Franklin County youth unlocking their potential through entrepreneurship, job readiness, financial and technology education and action" and does so with programs such as a buisness center, cyber cafe, and social service marketing projects.

What other projects or ideas are floating around about entrepreneurship? Here's a place to start!

40 Developmental Assets

Catherine Moore — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 21:58:58 +0000

http://www.search-institute.org/assets/40AssetsList.pdf

This is a great link for anyone working with youth. It's a list of 40 Developmental Assets as compiled by the Search Institute... you can check out their site for other youth surveys, studies, and information.

Looks like I'll be learning how to use Audacity to do some music editing with charter high school students in Middleton, I'm excited to learn more about it!

Digital Media Group - November Updates

danielle martin — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 22:20:02 +0000

Sorry for the delay, but here’s the notes from the last Digital Media group call on November 3rd. As a whole, a lot of our conversation centered on the challenges of working with youth media projects, such as lack of equipment, youth motivation, developing handouts and guides. Subsequently, AJ followed up by volunteering to gather any curriculum and handouts people are willing to share. [Check out the archives of the discussion list at http://www.ctcvista.org/forum/] In future calls, we plan to center on topics such as web design techniques (Dreamweaver or Drupal), video editing help and youth development. Our next call is scheduled for Friday, December 15th at 2pm EST.

Here's some individual highlights:

AJ & Kevin (Home Inc) - working on after school programs with little to no video equipment; HOME Inc is evicted from office space and moving to BNN Roxbury; developing Final Cut materials for youth; challenge of distributing tasks out to large group of youth (8-22 youth) to do one video project; meeting challenge of no equipment by improvising and using cell phones; offered to gather some of CTC VISTAs curriculum and handouts
Colleen (Project Think Different) - see article for Digest about new Media Literacy Series program (Media Watch Teens she trained in the summer now lead 4 months of trainings for other org's like Roxbury B&G Club; office dynamics and personnel changes at PTD adding to her workload;
Dina (Project Think Different) - now that PTD electronic community projectthinkdifferent.org/civic/ ("a socially conscious My Space") is in it's final stages (where she edited Drupal/PHP modules by hand) with radio, forums, and podcasts - its soft launch on 10/31, working on some print materials for PTD and CTC VISTA and re-organizing the PTD filing system
Gariet (Portland Community Television/OLLIE) - getting hardware soon for MNN's Digital Distribution project and continuing to work with schools; requests more time in the day!
Jeff (UTEC)- switched to TANP group; we’ll miss you!
Jessica (Center for Digital Storytelling) – participated train-the-trainer in Ukiah, now she's trained to do those workshops (future workshops include foster youth and domestic violence); research about who's doing storytelling in Berkeley area is now on hold because they don't have time to support; working on content for the StoriesforChange.net portal; working on redesigning some promotional materials and a Final Cut Xpress handout update (will try to share shorter version)
Lashanda (Benton Harbor African Arts and Culture Council) - programs are going ok but working with supervisor to get updated computer equipment.
Lauren (Media Bridges) - getting some content for the youth channel but needs more!; in process of setting up youth film festival with schools (old name "Sprockets") as Youth Channel kickoff and more established programs for youth such as an 8 week project based workshop in January; interested in doing collaboration to go to conferences;
Ray (Computers4Kids) - developing workshops and writing them up; 10-15 workshops developed so far - digital photography, 3d modeling with Bryce, photoshop composites, web page design, silent movies with imovie, remix in GarageBand;
Richard (MOLLIE) – working on video projects in schools, where the subjects of the videos match the school curriculum, such as astronomy – challenged by lack of hard drive space for editing; wants to set up an audio production track but need to survey the community
Shaneka (WYTEC) - attending an Entreprenuership conference in AZ; developed a tshirt business/marketing plan with youth; continuing to develop a girls program; also developing an adult computer literacy program (created her own manual) based on resources on GCF Global learning (will check about sharing the .pdf)
Tony (BGC AZ) - Techathalon this weekend; he's been doing the setup with getting teams organized and working behind the scenes; posted AYW animations (with video and sound); lack of real programming for teens, so he's trying to do movie/video projects but teens don't like the more structured programming;; got his motorcycle going as a form of transportation;
Will (Reel Works) - been working on Benefit 11/14, documentary about the program; helps with classes, guides people through the editing process; working on using MySpace to recruit new youth, and putting movies and films up on there;