#DoNow w/ GoPro!

Project Description:

This year my students, along with students across the country, have participated in the KQED DoNow project. This weekly activity encourages students to use social media to engage with and respond to current events, art, and pop culture by learning about them through a multi-media weekly blog, and tweeting their responses in an open discussion. Through this project, my students have reported feeling more informed and involved in current events--they feel that their voices are heard on a national level, and several of them have been featured on the DoNow “weekly roundup” as representatives of the voice of youth in our country.

Now, what if we took this momentum, and added an additional component--one that helps students see that these national issues are at play in their own lives, in their own local communities?

Here’s where the GoPro enters in. My project would build upon the good work being done by DoNow, and ask students to seek out and record local examples of the issues in civics, politics, art, and pop culture they are learning about through KQED in innovative, transformative ways. For instance, they could strap a camera on a football player to enhance their discussion of concussions in high school sports. A camera on could chronicle the way children interact with art in a local exhibit, follow a first-time voter through this civic experience, capture local wildlife, threatened species, or other environmental concerns unique to a region, document local racial or socioeconomic inequality, and countless other projects and ideas yet to be imagined by students in response to changing times, individual communities, and youthful creativity. 

With the GoPro experience, students would go beyond being informed about national issues--they would experience these issues first-hand through the amazing lense of a GoPro camera! And once created with the GoPro, these videos become a student’s contribution to the national discussion. Beyond learning and responding to events, students would upload videos to Youtube, tweet the links back to the DoNow Twitter feed, and share the videos in the OER Commons to inspire further discussion with peers beyond their school through student-created open educational resources.


As an English teacher at Mountain Heights Academy (an all-online statewide high school) and former ISKME fellow, I see this project as one that could be implemented as a way of meeting my own classroom objectives, and also shared with others. This project, paired with a research and writing activity, would be an innovative way to meet English standards for engagement, research, collaboration, and presentation, and shared in the OER Commons as a lesson that could iterate from year to year in classrooms across the world.

Visual Sketch: