Digital Storytelling: Reflections (Week of 28 September)

I have been using digital storytelling since coming to ISB. As a language teacher (previously in the ES and now in the MS) it offers excellent opportunities for students to put vocabulary and language structures to use in realistic and creative ways. Students can demonstrate mastery and, even more importantly, to extend their use of language in new and creative ways. As a teacher, I can create many opportunities for language use, but a truly open-ended activity (such as digital story-telling) allows students to combine language in truly original ways. This is the heart of language development.

In my Humanities class, digital storytelling offers similar opportunities for language development. With many English language learners in the classroom, this type of project provides a different kind of challenge for students learning to express their ideas. For all students, a digital story about an artifact or about looting is a different but valuable opportunity to build on one of our core Grade 6 skills - the support of an argument with evidence.

The precision of language necessary to both be convincing and entertaining is essential for all students and transfers well to written work. Though digital storytelling does not replace academic writing, there is great value in linking ideas and images. It shows a students interpretations of the connections between concepts in a multiplicity of ways.

Digital Literacy and My Presentations

Two images: guess which one is the 'before'.


For this week's class I reviewed my Back to School Night presentation. I chose this one because of the challenge of making a thought-provoking presentation with powerful imagery while at the same time having to impart some basic straight-forward information.

During Back to School Night, for example, I always try to give the parents an introduction to the goals of the curriculum. I find that most parents are not particularly interested in the nuts and bolts of the curriculum (and tend to forget them when you tell them) but want to know about what their children will be striving to achieve throughout the year.

In Grade 6 this is a particularly interesting topic since it involves a very large transition from more literal to more abstract thought. We are constantly asking students, for example, "What does this represent?" "How could this idea be represented symbolically?" "What does this artifact possibly tell you about the people who inhabited this region?'' Etc. etc. etc. This often initially confounds students who have been very successful in the past, so I like to give parents an idea of what their children might be struggling with at the start of the year. Essays and discussion about books, for example, throw many students who are powerfully drawn to re-telling the plot. It can be frustrating at first but leads to an explosion of new ideas and WAYS of thinking about things.

In addition, the evening provides a great opportunity to talk to parents about some of the difficulties they are already facing at home (children who are suddenly uncommunicative, who see their friends as increasingly important, who want to be independent but are sometimes not ready etc.). In a sense, both students and parents are going through tremendous changes and I want parents to know that communication with me is an essential part of managing the change.

These ideas are easy to represent visually with powerful and interesting imagery. This year, my images were generally of classroom activity and, though they provided me with a suitable springboard for my questions and comments, they were not in and of themselves thought-provoking. Saturday gave me a chance to revamp much of my presentation for next year and to find many 'symbolic' images. For example, I chose a shot of an empty, desolate-looking bus shelter to represent the idea that students and parents are not alone in the changes they are experiencing. Next year, I have no doubt that the image will stay with parents long after they have forgotten my name.

It also allowed me time to figure out how to include basic information such as website URLs (parent portal, student portal, my blog) that I want parents to have. I settled on showing parents the sites (by embedding the link in my powerpoint) and then emailing them the links themselves. Since I don't expect many of them to be taking notes, this seemed like a good compromise.

Digital Storytelling and Final Project

This is both my digital story telling example from 26 September and my final course project integrating several digital tools. This will serve as a sample for my students as they create a final project for our Archaeology Dig Project.

Powerful Images

Instead of choosing an image from creativecommons.org, I used a photo that I took this summer in South Africa. As we are studying archaeology and working with our students to develop analytical and interpretive skills, I placed this image on my blog.

I asked students to look at the image (actually several images) of the rock carving and the surrounding environment and to, without any context of geography or time period, try to interpret what this image could tell us about the people who did the carving.

Students used the image of the carving, the medium of stone and the background (arid, desert-like conditions) to come up with reasonable arguments about the people who created this work.

Students theorized that:
the creators of this work hunted animals;
the creators of this work worshipped animals;
the creators of this work carved these images in honour of the animals they hunted;
the creators of this work had 'primitive tools';
the creators of this work did not have many vegetables to eat;
the creators of this work followed the animals they hunted over large distances;
and the creators of this work left these images as a map to find animals later.

Several aspects of their predictions are/were accurate. Most importantly what they said allowed us to talk about the perspective of archaeologists and historians. As these carvings were made by San/Bushmen hunters between 2000-5000 years ago, the investigation into their origins offers many clues as to how/why we interpret images.

Early researchers saw these carvings as 'primitive' art. They believed that the San people made simple images because these animals were important to them in some way. Subsequent research found that the carvings were made as tracking and teaching tools. The animals were depicted to help teach young hunters how to identify and find food sources.

The use of this (and the other) images provided a powerful starting point to a discussion about archaeology and our (human) penchant for bringing our own perspectives and biases into our interpretations. Without this image, our discussion would have been both more forced (in our search for context) and less related to their own interpretations of historical artifacts.

Course 3, Post 1 Evolution of Teaching

Digital tools have allowed me to embrace new media to both initiate and extend classroom dialogue. They have strengthened the quality of student discussion and encouraged further examination of ideas.

The examples are endless, but two recent examples include shelfari and good old fashioned student blogs. In the first example, my team and I decided to use shelfari as a core medium for our students' independent reading work. As students read, they share their ideas and opinions about what they have read. While this basic concept is in no way new, shelfari allows students to extend their discussion beyond the classroom. For those who are interested, and there are quite a few, the medium allows them to 'talk' about books (and, I hope, eventually literature) outside of what school requires of them. The quality of their dialogue and comments increases and allows us to start our classroom discussion in a more sophisticated place.

I use shelfari in class and for homework and see room for students to pursue a new direction in their reading and greater depth in their understanding of what they read. Without the guidance of the classroom, few would use the site for anything other than a social gathering around books, but it complements well our academic goals for our students as critical readers.

Regular blogging offers some similar advantages. My students have a ready record of their work, and especially their writing. The ability to easily see growth (or lack of it) is a hugely powerful tool. When compared to a folder hanging on a rack in the corner that students occasionally shuffle through, there is no comparison.

Perhaps most importantly, students have much greater opportunity to view and evaluate the work of their peers. With one simple homework assignment, I can have students reading the ideas and opinions of other students. This informs their own opinions, whether through agreement or disagreement, and encourages more independent reflection.