Interviewer: Can you describe your work?

Susan Abdulezer: I work with teachers who teach students who have a variety of learning styles. And I teach those teachers how to approach technology so that they can think creatively about how to use the technology and how to get their students to use technology to explore and exploit those varieties of learning styles. And I put it in terms of learning styles because the kids have all kinds of challenges including developmental disabilities, autism, deafness, and blindness. And technology, when used in each of those learning contexts presents a tremendous opportunity. That's basically what I do. Teachers come to me and learn how to use these tools, and then we brainstorm about their approaches in the classroom.

I am also lucky enough to occasionally get to work with some kids. I don't get to see them as much as I used to. Then, I really get ideas. Usually my most creative technology brewing sessions are watching kids use the technology and see how they come up with things.

Interviewer: What are the ways address story or storytelling in your work?

Susan Abdulezer: There's a tremendous amount of use of stories to get at all kinds of information and to express all kinds of information. I never actually teach any particular technological skill in software or hardware as an isolated skill. I may teach a skill, but I will never teach that skill as sort of an end in itself. I don't teach people how to make beautiful digital pictures just to make digital beautiful pictures although there's certainly a need for that. That's not at all what I do.

I always teach and have people develop their ideas in the context of communicating some kind of story. And sometimes those stories are research projects. Sometimes, they're stories based on actual facts or observations of actual facts. But there's always a combination of text and visual and narrative and video. And sometimes I leave one or two of those out depending on the learning style. Deaf children won't be so concerned about the sound of things. The blind children won't be so concerned with the look of things. But it's always in the context of some sort of story. They cover the entire range.

For example, the classic school story is a trip to the aquarium, or to the zoo. And teachers will come in and say we're going on this trip and how can we not only record this trip but have a point of view about this trip, and have this trip lead to other expressions of curiosity by the kids. Have them look things up on the Web that are related to this trip. Have the kids involved in seeing themselves interactively on this trip.

It leads to a story to the trip to the aquarium; whereas, it might simply have been a little note home that they went and they had a few experiences and that was the end of that. The story has been preserved. And it can be shared with parents. Those stories that ordinarily would have been lost or communicated awkwardly because many parents at home cannot understand what their developmentally delayed child is talking about, or they don't communicate with their autistic child, or they don't understand sign language.

Suddenly there's a means to actually form a common communication through the story of this trip between the child and their own family which is really very crucial especially in urban schools. And that's only one example of how a story is used in an approach in a classroom.

There are others. There was one, really quite lovely example of a teacher who works in a school that has an inclusion program. This is a program where there are little kids who are not handicapped, and then there are those who have disabilities of various sorts. And this teacher decided to read the book The Diary of Anne Frank with these kids. The kids drew impressions of the story of Anne Frank in World War II in the concentration camp in Kid Pix on the computer. The teacher then would gather the kids around, and they'd look at the pictures and talk about these pictures and get the kids' impressions. And the teacher put together a small narrative on one page an interactive story that branched out to the kids' visual impressions of pre-World War II villages, of what Anne Frank looked like, of her room, of the people in the gas chamber in the concentration camp. You know, they were very powerful pictures just done in Kid Pix. And the way that it was all put together had a layer of sound underneath of Klezmer music that went through the whole thing.

The teacher really collaborated with the kids to explore this. That is also pretty neat. That the teacher is not just the little ruler, that you have to do this assignment, but is a participant in the assignment and story development. This way the teacher has the same level of excitement about producing them as kids do .