What is the Adobe Youth Voices project?
Adobe Youth Voices (AYV) engages talented educators of middle- and high-school-age youth (ages 13 – 18) in a year-long professional development and support program. Educators enhance their teaching strategies, gain new skills, and collaborate with like-minded educators and youth media experts to enable young people to express themselves using digital tools and to create media with a personally meaningful purpose. Educators from participating sites join a global network and exhibit and share youth-created media projects, including videos, documentaries, photojournalism, animations, websites, and multimedia. iEARN joined the Adobe Youth Voices program as a founding partner in 2006, and now manages and supports the program in over 16 countries around the world. Schoolnet South Africa coordinates this programme and has received sponsorships for twelve teachers to participate in the 2014- 2015 year.
What do we need you to do?
• Participate in an 8-week online course
• Develop an AYV program plan for the year, which will be drafted collaboratively during the training
• Launch their program plan and guide at least 25 youth over the course of the year in the creation of youth media using the digital tools provided. The youth media needs to be planned and designed to ensure youth voice is being heard. Youth should be guided to choose issues that could effect positive change in the immediate community and design a project that highlights the social issue and perhaps provide solutions as well.
• Complete periodic reports describing progress, sharing best practices, and evaluating the benefit of AYV for youth
• Participate in the AYV online community, sharing stories and program progress
• Work with Ms Omashani Naidoo (SchoolNet) to launch exhibition events during the program year
• Contribute youth media work (accompanied by required model releases and licensing agreement paperwork) to the AYV collection by end February 2015 to be exhibited locally, online, and globally
How do we choose teachers?
• Experience in facilitating or an interest in learning new strategies for project-based learning
• Strong belief in student-centered community and social change projects
• Passionate about sharing youth perspectives and voices
• Committed to engaging youth in rigorous investigation of topics of their own choosing that are relevant and meaningful to their lives
• Motivated and available to participate in AYV, without any insurmountable barriers to success
•The crucial element is that Teachers must get learners to submit media projects
Any special motivations to join?
•We will also be hosting an Adobe Workshop for participating teachers
•We will sponsor ONE teacher to attend attendance of the IEARN conference in Brasilia, Brazil 2015 if any of the submitted media is accepted to be showcased at The AYV Media Festival. All travelling, accommodation, and conference expenses will be sponsored
How do you get involved if you are interested?
If you are interested in this programme, please write to mathapelo@schoolnet.org.za or contact our office 011 4035777 for more information or to receive an application form.
Last year’s award winners
Take a look at some of the folk that won awards last year. Read about the awards here: http://youthvoices.adobe.com/awards/winners/ Here is an example of one of the winning 5minute projects plus a playlist of the winners’ videos http://goo.gl/yqQHCm.
