Technology Projects with an Emphasis on “Emotional Connection”

By Dr. Rose Reissman

Often, in their enthusiasm to present activities whose goal is the learning of technology skills to their classes, teachers lose sight of how rich technology-based projects can also serve students’ needs for emotional connection and self-understanding.  

Many diligent technology teachers and their tech using colleagues from across the curriculum follow a product-driven instructional map, making certain that after a set number of sessions their students produce a rubric-aligned product. This may be a PowerPoint presentation, a podcast segment, an online video interview with a peer or teacher, or other product variety from this growing portfolio of best practice, project-based activities.

While such products are what research-driven supervisors and teachers can proudly use to validate success, as demonstrated by performance tasks - D’Acquisto, (2006), of their students’ technology skills, the students miss a powerful opportunity to ocus on. and express their individual identities and selves, as well as their cultural and community backgrounds and affinities.   While their learning products demonstrate mastery of tech skills, if that is the sole focus, then the opportunity they represent to also foster self-defining holistic personal reflection and discovery is left out of their experience.

Why Have an Instructional ‘Either/Or?’

Is there any pedagogical necessity for this favoring of one set of learning goals over the other? Or is this simply a case of over specialization, of purpose-driven myopia? Would getting the students to infuse their own personal, emotional, and cultural experience into technology focused projects derail the skills lists and accomplishments? Of course not! And very likely, students would be better engaged, motivated, and focused to learn them better.

Why focus at all on the students’ social and emotional development if what has to be shown is taken to be exclusively the tech skills taught for college. and career readiness?  Why not simply leave the students’ personal selves, creativity, cultural backgrounds and holistic development to the English, Social Studies, and Health teachers.  Afterall, that realm is theirs alone, not  that of the busy professional tech teacher’s. Or is it?

A Model of Best of Both Approaches Combined

At Ditmas IS 62 (a public middle school in Brooklyn, NYC), technology teacher, Angelo Carideo, teaches a class titled  'Technology Talent.'  Mr. Carideo feels strongly that his students’ individual, cultural, community and creative identities are key entry points on which he can focus in order to  positively impact the quality of his students’ technology learning, something accomplished through the tech products they create.  

Currently, his goal is to provide in this class ongoing opportunities for students to engage in visual art, music, and dance learning and create showcase products and performances to present to the entire school community. He explicitly focuses on the need for his participating talent students to develop showcase products which reflect their lives, cultures, and concepts of self.

Projects for Tech and Self Discovery

Mr. Carideo teaches his students to use digital cameras in order to record events around the school that reflect their own perspective. They travel around the school finding stories, shooting interviews, and taking photos of students and teachers who interest them. These become the raw material for many of their project-driven tech products. Viewed more broadly, they also represent opportunities to focus on identity and the factors that shape and influence it.

The Arts are often biographical and the way they manifest in the Tech Talent Class is a great example. Students are empowered to choose the theme of the content they will produce.  In fact, Mr. Cariedo frames the projects with the caveat that the students have to work together in teams to determine the theme they will address. This collaborative quality, too, offers opportunity to explore the world of personal identity.

In one 7th grade class, for instance, the students developed a very personal social issue theme that made for provocative podcast listening.  What resulted was very authentic, something that lead to high engagement and passion in the work of the students. So much so that after expressing satisfaction with having dealt with a self-chosen theme of a personal issue very close to their hearts and minds, they opted for it not to be made public for the upcoming, school-wide showcase.  This necessitated their redoing their podcasts with content that would still interest them, yet would not be so personally disclosing for a school audience of peers and parents.The students were happy to do this and learned valuable social/emotional lessons along the way.

Technology Teacher in Collaboration with Core Curriculum Colleagues

A favored mode of project in Mr. Carideo’s class is for students to write and stage skits that the students will also shoot video of and then upload for web-based sharing and viewing by the school community. In developing this approach he realized that the nature and content of the skit project he wanted to assign was an area beyond his tech teacher expertise; he required insight into teaching the genre in order to motivate and inform the students.

He reached out to the school's literacy coach, who ordinarily works with its ELA teachers. She supported him in developing a time travel theme which  would challenge the students to decide at this young stage of their lives whether they wanted to travel back in time to “fix” or change aspects of their pasts or travel forward in time to see their futures as adults.

Mr. Carideo was astonished at the raw, highly emotional revelations in the students' notes to their past younger child selves.  These notes detailed things like regret for not being kinder to dying grandparents or enjoying happy moments with adults who had left their lives. The wisdom of some of these eleven year olds in realizing that changing the past is not a good idea was also noteworthy.  The drawings the students made prior to using the technology made the final, tech-based products that much richer for the students emotionally. Having the art work to incorporate and add emotional color enhanced their technology platformed projects considerably.

Another approach that Mr. Carideo favors involves having his students discover the impact of global, cultural geography on their lives. Aware that his Title 1 students have limited opportunities for travel, Mr. Carideo showed them how to use Google Earth and online video research to provide a setting for a fantasy travel 90 second, mixed-media video with voice recordings, music, and  Google Earth-derived background images to present to a school assembly from the auditorium stage. 

Mr. Carideo wisely began preparing his students to create these showcase products by having them share geographic regions they had visited as part of family “native homeland” summer trips and finding these online as videos or maps or informational narratives.  The students enjoyed researching these sites and some other exotic ones from their seats as a rehearsal for their own informational presentation set in these sites. They would use the projection of their researched footage as a backdrop for their sketch. The result of their passionate work on these products included not only acquiring a handful of sophisticated technology use insights and skills, but deeper understanding of their own backgrounds and pride in sharing them with their community of peers.

For another project the literacy coach suggested using a walk home from the school building, an experience shared by all middle school students at this neighborhood school in Kensington Brooklyn. Google Earth made the walk come alive and memorable for the students and, of course, added a rich level of sensory data to their writings and visual art.  These they drew on in creating podcast readings of their writings about this walk- memoir.

This project supports the students in demonstrating spoken and written fluency; it’s an activity anchored in Jason Reynolds’s Look Both Ways.  If this activity were presented purely to teach podcasting skills and use of Google Earth what would be overlooked would be the very meaningful focus on student individual school walks as an exploration of their personal and community lives.

It’s About How Tech Projects Reveal the Personal, Individual Side of Students

Every successful tech learning program ultimately needs to succeed with special needs and ESL learners. ITo ensure this Mr. Carideo makes certain to get to know his middle school students as individual persons and as talents.  As an example, with a 6^th grade class, Mr. Carideo observed how one student, Jayson, was able to make artisan DIY figures from pipe cleaners and yarn.  Each was vibrant and distinctive.  Jayson was able to talk about each of them.  Mr. Carideo had Jayson interviewed, as though he were a noted crafts artist, by a peer holding a mike to whom Jayson explained, his process step by step, . 


Mr. Cariedo found out that the class had studied the popular book “Wonder” with their ELA teacher. Accordingly, he had the students use, as their podcast topic, whether or not a student with cranial facial anomalies should be home schooled or not; in the book, the character Auggie has had 27 plastic surgeries, The students knew what being different meant in the context of the story and their own lives.  Thus, a tech skills oriented project, by dint of carefully selected focus content, facilitated through cross discipline study and teacher to teacher collaboration,yielded a Social and Emotional Learning-rich experience for the students.

Ultimately, as all true arts talent educators and tech educators realize, the desired and hoped for outcome lies not so much in the rubric evaluated quality of the student products, but in the palpable transformative evolution of the student as an informed, caring, expressive person.  Toward this goal educators like Mr. Carideo realize that the powers of technology to make an emotional and holistic connection are waiting to facilitate deeper and more meaningful student experience. 

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Angelo Carideo has been at Ditmas IS 62 for 17 years. He is part of the Software Engineering Program Team. This school year 2019 2020, he developed the new Tech Talent program that he teaches. Its goal is to use technology skills and tools as an integral part of producing showcase products tapping students’ talents and social and emotional learning abilities.

Ditmas Is 62 is a neighborhood intermediate school in Kensington, Brooklyn, NYC District 20. It has over 1,200 students enrolled - over 13 percent ESL students, in addition to special needs students and regular education classes. Each grade has enrichment classes. The school is a leader in SEP (Software Engineering Program, a NYC technology initiative) and has always focused on developing student talents. This is its first year to offer a Tech Talent class. There are over 1200 students enrolled at Ditmas.

Marielena Santiago is the Principal of DITMAS.  Olivene McIntosh is the Assistant Principal in charge of SEP. 
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Dr. Rose Reissman is the founder of the Writing Institute, now replicated in 200 schools including PS 191 in Manhattan, New York City.  She is a featured author in New York State Union Teachers Educators Voice 2016 and was filmed discussing ESL student leadership literary strategies developed at Ditmas IS 62, a Brooklyn public intermediate school. Ditmas IS 62 is under the leadership of Marielena Santiago Principal and Michelle Buitrago AP. The Writing Institute Team are: Michael Downes, Angelo Carideo, and Amanda Xavier.

Contact: roshchaya@gmail.com