Flat+Stanley

=The Flat Stanley Project=

A third grade teacher from Ontario, Canada, Dale Hubert, created the Flat Stanley Project in 1995. The basic idea of this project is for students to send a drawing or picture of Flat Stanley. He is accompanied by a journal created for him for the first few days of the project by the children. He is then sent to family members, children from other schools in other states, etc. so that the children can visit those places through Flat Stanley. Photos are taken of Flat Stanley and journal entries are made when he arrives at his destination and the children are able to view those photos via the Flat Stanley Project website at []. Journal entries are often sent via postcards or emails. This all started as a penpal activity, but it has expanded into so much more.

I was introduced to the Flat Stanley Project while completing a project for this class. Step one of this project was to take Flat Stanley on his adventure and take pictures of him. This was a fun project where I printed off several color-free templates of Flat Stanley and had my six year-old daughter, Arwen, color them. I felt it was important to get her involved with this project as well, and she continues to talk about where Flat Stanley will show up next. We then had to think about where we were going to take Stanley. We wanted to go places that were both interesting and fun.

The next step was to manipulate the photos so they are dynamic and ready for presentation on the web. Through the use of photo editing software like Picnik, I was able to crop and alter the color and focus of the photos to show on the collaborative website. I had a great time changing resolution, adding frames, and cropping the photos so that they appeared almost professional on the class website.

The third step was to create an audio recording describing Flat Stanley's day of adventure. This was a very enlightening project using the Audacity software to create an MP3 recording to place on the website. It was great fun describing the day as if Flat Stanley was speaking. If you listen to the recording, you'll hear that he had quite an exciting day.

media type="file" key="Stanley Narative.mp3" align="center" width="240" height="20"

The final step of the project was to complete a wiki page in the EDT6010 Flat Stanley page which can be found here (EDT6010 Flat Stanley Homepage). The page that I created for this site can be found by clicking on the picture of Flat Stanley on this page or you can click here ( Dawn Follin's Flat Stanley Page).

Because I teach in a higher education environment, I had never heard of the Flat Stanley Project. When I originally read the assignment, I immediately thought about how I could possibly use this in a project for this class. Stanley was just a little paper man and my mind was blank when it came to figuring out how he could be used in an educational technology environment. After viewing the Flat Stanley Project website, I began contemplating several ideas. My submission to the Flat Stanley wiki is only a small portion of how I could have expanded on this assignment.

Stanley began taking on a personality and I put him in situations where he would naturally find himself. I thought of him as an adventurer since he has been seen all over the world. I was thinking he was sort of a conservative Indiana Jones. He is a little silly, but he takes his job very seriously. I realized that this figure could be used throughout the entire year of school. He could be used on a weekly basis to show children new ideas, new places, and new experiences. If Stanley showed these things to the children, it would be a much more interesting exercise than having a teacher stand in the front of the class lecturing all day. He's interactive and fun and this is the better avenue for educating our children. It will keep them engaged and they will see that learning doesn't necessarily have to be boring. I hope that I will have the opportunity to explore more with Flat Stanley as I continue my education.

Through the Flat Stanley Project, I learned many new skills and enhanced others. I had the opportunity to discover some great photo editing tools like Picnik. I learned how to edit a photo so that it would be appropriate in both size and appearance to suit a web page. I learned about how to properly place a photo on a website to make it easy for the user to view the information that may be contained there. These are skills that I had learned here and there through out my own exploration into photography, but this project helped me to better hone those skills and focus how I could use them in a learning environment. Because I enjoy using photostories in my classroom and technologies to enhance teaching such as Animoto, this project has helped me to transform photos into learning tools that I can use throughout my teaching experience.

= =