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Glenbrook students share passion for recycling

Date: 5/18/2009

By Courtney Llewellyn

Reminder Assistant Editor



LONGMEADOW A select group of nine students taught by Anne Marie Salvon, the instruction technology teacher at Glenbrook Middle School, are part of something big.

The aforementioned students are working on a media project for the International Education and Resource Network (iEARN), which encourages students to think in a creative and socially responsible manner by working collaboratively and communicating effectively with fellow-aged students from across the country and the globe.

"This is a once in a lifetime thing," sixth grader Julianne Kapner told Reminder Publications. "I've never done anything like this before."

The students first needed to figure out what they wanted to focus on in their project, and Anne Marie said the group eventually honed in on recycling.

"I think recycling is a good thing," Abbey Salvon, one of the sixth graders working on the project, stated. "The world's just gonna get worse and worse unless we do something."

"We saw a lot of people interested in things like sports, but we need something global," Ian Gauthier added.

Mike Wrabel, director of Public Works, showed the students around the town's recycling center while they took photographs and shot footage for their project. According to the town's Web site, Longmeadow initiated a municipal Recycling Center in 1979 for the purpose of making available to the residents the recycling of household materials.

Once the students gathered their information, they needed to figure out how to present it in a movie they're piecing together using the Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 and Adobe Premiere Elements 7 software, which was provided to Anne Maries's classes through the Adobe Youth Voices program.

Maddie Black explained that the format of their movie will be to present a question and then use the data they gathered to answer it. The movie itself cannot be more than five minutes in length.

"We've been sorting through the photos, and we can also include logos," Gauthier explained. He added that he hasn't used Adobe like this at home, so he's learning something new with this project.

Abbey said that what the group wants people to take away from their movie is for them "to realize what is happening to the earth and learn what to do to change it."

"People think [recycling] one piece of paper won't help," she continued. "It will. There's a lot of people in the world. We can make a difference."

"We're exposing why recycling is wonderful," Kapner added.

The students have until June 30 to finish their movie.

Teacher Anne Marie applied to the Adobe Youth Voices program in August 2008 because she was interested in their mission of empowering youth worldwide to comment on their world using multimedia and digital tools. In 2008-09, iEARN was expanded in Argentina, Belarus, Botswana, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, India, Pakistan, Russia, Taiwan, Turkey, Uganda and the United States. Anne Marie is one of seven U.S. teachers involved in the project.

Other schools in the U.S. participating in the project are located in Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota and Louisiana, which are working on projects as diverse as how deaf people live in other parts of the world to immigration.

Anne Marie received the Adobe software and six weeks of online professional training through the program, which she is using to aid her students in their project. Once finished, their movie will be posted on the Adobe Youth Voices Web site at www.adobeyouthvoices.org, to be shared worldwide.