Story telling as an ancient tradition; digital storytelling integrates visual, interactive, and reiterative with constructive ideas
“combining the art of telling stories with some mixture of digital graphics, text, recorded audio narration, video…” B. Robin, 2006
Purpose of the Study
Outlines application of DS in pre-school and effects discovered on students’ learning (age 6)
Fall 2007, two pre-school classrooms with 28 students and 2 teachers total
Stories in pre-school
Great way of communication in classrooms
Teacher tells story, students “dial in” on the words
May use music and interaction
Story for this study
Story of the first president of the Turkish Republic
Used historical photo graphs, his recorded speech, songs he liked, etc.
Procedure
Pre-knowledge from students
Data gathered through classroom observation, teacher interviews, assessment of students’ drawings
Students drew a picture of the story and explained the drawings
Results
Students had a good understanding of the subject from the digital story
Although their drawings were simple, they were able to retell what they saw in the story
Only 3 of the 28 students couldn’t explain the main idea from the story
Teachers felt that the content was more understandable, were willing to create stories, agreed that it helped get across more content in a limited time, felt that they didn’t have time or technical knowledge
This week, I am at SITE 2008, preparing for a presentation on Project WRITE tomorrow. Today, I will try to blog from some of the sessions (as wifi will allow). Here are three sessions on digital storytelling that I attended this morning. (I will also cross-post on my Digital Writing, Digital Teaching Blog):
Pre- and post-surveys for teacher indicated interests in storytelling
The effective digital story:
Uses only a few images, a few words, and fewer special effects to powrfully communicate meaning
Flows naturally and is limited to 2-3 minutes
Is supported with effective teacher training
Focuses on the writing and communication proess rather than just digital effects
Is solidly grounded in curriculum and expresses relevant content knowledge (Question: what counts as curriculum? Is this only for expository reports of content?)
Goals of the project
Implement teacher training on effective and efficient methods of integrating digital video editing technology into the classroom
Enable students to creat enhancements to traditional written/oral assignments using digital storytelling
No more than 5 images by a single artist of 10% of a collection of images may be used from an internet or copyrighted source, if attributed
Design, Development, and Implementation
Curriculum Overview
In proceedings paper
Teachers
2 hour workshop using a whole group setting with guided practice and interactive group work
Printed materials with step-by-step guides
Learned on how to import, sequence, an editing music and images
Techniques on internet searchers, writing scripts, and storyboarding
Saving and rendering digital movies into condensed Quick Time format for presentation and evaluation
Student Project
Conducting valid research using the internet, books, and materials provided by the teachers (historical perspective on the Holocaust)
Writing a script and creating a storyboard of images and text
Went through same process of creating movies as teachers did
Learning how to cite sources and give proper attribution to collected images and music
Movies were presented in a whole group setting for peer review and teacher evaluation on content, flow, and impact of story
Evaluating the project
Images
Limit the amount of images that students collect to 10-15 images
Google search for large or extra large images only
Choice of images that can be scaled to correct size and aspect ration
Images should appear for at least 10 seconds
text should appear long enough to be read by audience
Images should appear alone long enough to convey impact and meaning
Narrative
Text narrative is often more efficient than audio narratives
Background noise can distract from the quality of the story
Use of audio equipment can take more time than can be practical
Effects
Simple fades and dissolves
Basic effect applications for motion
Use b/w or sepia tones for image color consistency
Music
Create own music
Get copyright free music
Conclusion
Effective stories captivate attention, use minimal special effects, and translate relevant content knowledge
They are a part of the curriculum and supported by effective teacher training
Enhance traditional forms of assessments
Reflections:
As I listened to this presentation, I was struck by the stark utilitarian vision of digital storytelling. In short, this seemed to be an enhanced version of writing the report that students have always been asked to do. By searching for images and creating, essentially, captions for them, then combining them into a very short movie, there is not much of the student represented here. When I think about digital storytelling, I think of the personal narrative or, at least, a much more personal take on an expository topic. This type of digital story would be easy to assess (10-15 images, appropriate captions with facts), which is not necessarily a good thing. The writing process is messy, and this is a sanitized version of digital storytelling.
Independent four-year institute of 2000 students, in NJ and near NYC
Introduction to Education
Gateway course for education majors, geared towards technology and is a hybrid course
Classroom management, multiple intelligences, lessong planning, inclusion, etc.
Self-reflection and life-long learning
Why digital storytelling?
Introduce new educational technology that students can use in their classroom
Introduce alternate way of self-expression
Create a wonderful addition to their ePortfolio
Make learning “fun”
Final assignment
“Your Own Journey of Learning” — create a movie that shows your learning this semester about issues in education
Research Questions
Will student choose digital storytelling as an option to express learning?
Whill it help them express themsleves fully?
Will it help them reflect on themselves more effectively?
Will the introdcution of DS not be helpul to our student, perhaps confusing them or making them feel less capable of themselves (not in the millennial generation, other side of the digital divide)?
Results
About half of the students choose to create digital stories and wanted to share them within and outside the class
Reflections:
This use of digital storytelling, too, was very functional, but did also show how teacher education students could compose their own stories (in particular, about learning how to teach). It was a different approach than the previous session, in that it discussed how students go through their own writing process to develop their own stories rather than reporting on other ideas. I am a bit concerned about the idea that this was done to be an “addition” to a portfolio or for “fun,” but I understand how that approach appeals to pre-service teachers. All in all, this idea could be a useful twist on the digital storytelling that I am asking students to do this year.
Paige is the Director of the Mobile Bay Writing Project and has been working with teachers at that site to develop digital stories
What is the difference between a digital story and power point? Bringing out the differences in genre and the ways that we think about using storytelling.
Reflections:
This was an intimate discussion with eight people, including Paige and Helen who have extensive experiences using digital storytelling. We wandered into discussions of the composing process, copyright, personal voice in narrative, uses of different digital storytelling tools, and other related ideas. Another link I forgot about: Educause’s 7 Things That You Should Know About Digital Storytelling.
This is an interesting post from 21st Century Connections that gives some pointers for use of movie-making in the classroom. I particularly liked this section:
Use Student Reflections for Assessment Purposes:
Begin the post-production stage by asking your students to reflect on the earlier (pre-production and production) stages of their digital media project. This activity enables you to elicit comments from students while the experience is still fresh.
Here are some sample questions to spur reflection:
What were the most challenging aspects of the pre-production and production stages?
What would you do differently next time?
What topics do you need to know more about?
What specific suggestions would you offer someone starting his first media project?
Use this assessment information to gauge students’ understandings as well as to plan for future classes.
This comes from a Blog Carnival by Matt Needleman and seemed appropriate for our site here, as it is a podcast with two workshop presenters (Gail Matthews-DeNatale and Bryan Alexander) on digital storytelling, Web 2.0 and assessment of work.
Some of you may take part in the Day in a Sentence feature. This week, we tried to move into some new technology by using VoiceThread for our sentences.
I’ve been tinkering with quickfiction (or flashfiction) and using the use of my podcasting voice as a way to edit my writing. I am literally writing, then reading out loud, then editing, then revising, then recording, as I go along — trying to be conscious of how my voice might influence my writing.
Bonnie suggested that perhaps there could be some marriage between the use of short fiction and some techniques of digital storytelling — i.e, writing quickfiction and then presenting in movie-form.
Here is my first attempt. I used my podcast from this short piece — called Remote – an used a Creative Common search engine called FlickrCC to grab some images that can be used with attribution. This was not easy, as the images brought something new and somewhat disjointed to the storytelling process. Perhaps more experimenting will help.
Anyway, here you go:
This comes following a workshop I attended (as a helping hand) at Bonnie’s site that used poetry and photostory3 to make a visual poem of sorts. I feverishly wrote a poem that day while others were also writing and then I felt the digital poem come together in my mind (I had to wait to get home to work on it because I was too busy helping others in the workshop).
I realize that I need a better way to list the credits for the photos I am using in these stories. Any ideas?
Our Collaborative ABC Movie Project gets released to the K12 Online Conference today and Bonnie and I are thrilled, nervous and wondering how our presentations will be received. We mixed up our formats a bit by:
First, Bonnie created a powerful overview movie of the reasons why we launched our ABC Movie project
Second, I created a podcast of my own. Take a listen.
Third, we put together a Webpage presentation that features the various tools that we used in the project, plus some nice podcast reflections by
And finally, in that Webpage, there is a hands-on collaborative story project that uses the letters of the alphabet and VoiceThread (please join in!)
The presentation also marks the true public showing of the various movies that we created in Jumpcut along various themes (thanks to Bonnie) and so here they are for your viewing:
The 2007 edition of the K12 Online Conference begins today with a keynote podcast by David Warlick on the theme of “Inventing New Boundaries.” Here is a full schedule of events for the virtual conference.
As some readers may know, Bonnie and I are also presenters later on in the month on the topic of our Collaborative ABC Movie project. It’s been interesting to try to develop a workshop in which people need to download presentations on their own time and where there is very little live interaction. Bonnie and I created a podcast, a movie and then a series of steps that lead to some interactive experimentation by folks. (Our presentation gets released on Monday, October 22).
We also have some nice podcast reflections from Bud, Cynthia and Gail added into our presentation.
Here is the description of the month-long event:
The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from educators around the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference is run by volunteers and open to everyone. The 2007 conference theme is “Playing with Boundaries”. This year’s conference begins with a pre-conference keynote the week of October 8, 2007. The following two weeks, October 15-19 and October 22-26, forty presentations will be posted online to the conference blog (this website) for participants to download and view. Live Events in the form of three “Fireside Chats” and a culminating “When Night Falls” event will be announced. Everyone is encouraged to participate in both live events during the conference as well as asynchronous conversations.
Hope to have you there — there are plenty of great presentations on tap.
