Final Project Reflection: 18 October 2009

My final project grew out of our (coetail) work doing digital storytelling and the Grade 6 Archaeology unit. As part of the unit, we do a week long dig in the classroom. With the help of ISB support staff, we turn the Humanities classrooms into dig sites. We bury a diverse range of artifacts in two giant sand boxes in the classrooms to re-create two villages or homes.

Each site contains a variety of 'domestic' artifacts relating to cooking, hunting/defence, religion, commerce and art. Students participate in the dig in rotating jobs, including digging, sifting, cataloguing and recording. Each day's dig is preceded and followed by a discussion and analysis of the finds. Emphasis is on forming a cohesive theory about the previous 'inhabitants' of the site, their way of life and culture. The theory must be based on the evidence and teachers frequently ask, "Why do you think that?" in order to force students to explain their rationale for their opinion.

This habit of mind (0f using evidence to support an opinion) is one of the primary goals of the grade 6 curriculum and the dig provides a unique opportunity to make 'discoveries' and articulate a point of view based upon them. Students often have differing points of view, but, despite that, often see commonalities in their interpretations of individual artifacts. As they discuss, they find out where they differ and endeavour to explain why they, personally, are right.

The dig traditionally culminates with a common assignment/assessment of a magazine-style article about an aspect of the dig. Students choose from a variety of article formats that tell the story of the people who inhabited the site and/or the story of the dig itself. During the dig, students take still photos and (this year I asked them to include) video to document the progress and process of the dig. During the digital storytelling part of our course I realized I could combine the video and stills to articulate many of the same ideas and complement the article.

The digital storytelling/film-making assignment allows students to collaborate with each other to meet many of the same goals as the magazine assignment. The collaborative aspect is particularly appealing because it puts students in a situation in which they once again have to discuss and defend their opinions. As they write their scripts for the project, they refine their opinions and learn to express them concisely. Most importantly they automatically use evidence to support their viewpoint in the form of the audiovisual images from the dig. This step reinforces their thinking process. My final project is a sample/model assignment for students.

Screencast It!

Screen casts lend themselves to any 'procedural' instructions for computer use in the classroom. As a language teacher whose goal is to use the target language as much as possible in during class time, this is particularly appealing. Demonstrating how to do something on the computer while using Spanish is incredibly difficult for students to follow. Even with the smartboard and a physical demonstration, it is very rare that more than half the class remembers the steps necessary to complete a task. A screen cast, however, allows students to view instructions at their own pace multiple times. This is an incalculably huge advantage.

Even without the language aspect of the Spanish classroom, I can't begin to count the number of times of times I have been pulled away from, for example, helping a student improve their writing in order to help a student upload a photo/save to the server/record audio etc. With a library of clips (time to compile one) explaining the common 'hows' on my blog, I would be able to focus on core learning.

The best part of this would be increased independence on the part of students. There are already many questions I don't answer but instead direct students to answer themselves by reading classroom text. Referring them to screen casts would be another step on the same path to independent resolution of simple problems. There is nothing so gratifying as watching a student figure out how to answer his/her own questions.

Finally, at many points in the K-12 curricula, we ask students to engage in procedural writing. Screen casting is an excellent opportunity to integrate procedural writing and technology use. Throw in a video camera and a student could do a screen cast of just about anything. The visual aspect of a screen cast would ensure that students do not leave out key steps in their explanations (something they inevitably do when they write).

7 October 2009: The Explosion of Video

The availability of video has indeed exploded. Just the venues of finding videos are hard to keep track of, let alone the videos themselves.

It seems that, with a bit of patience, one can find just about anything needed for the classroom. A perfect example is an old resource the Grade 6 team has used in the past - The Voyage of the Mimi. Originally an old PBS show (Ben Affleck way back in the 1980s) about archaeology, the school purchased a copy on VHS back in the day. As VHS players became scarce, the tapes were transferred to disc but with poor quality. When we discussed it in our team meeting I looked it up on youtube and, not surprisingly, someone has uploaded just about every episode.

Because of the web, the Mimi (and tons of other potential resources) are available world wide. What's more, with a bit of effort I can get my very own copy of the video by kicking or zamzaring. This is usually the case for just about any curricular idea. The challenge may be coming up with the perfect search query (or wading through tons of annoying video) but the material is out there.

Perhaps most importantly, as teachers we can easily capture moments, speeches, events etc. for classroom discussion and analysis. We can view them repeatedly without a whole other intermediary device other than the one already on our desks. Most importantly we can USE those same things to create something new. Converted to .mov format, students can import video clips, add audio tracks, additional footage, subtitles to become story-tellers or documentarians.

The web also gives the opportunity to share work with a global audience. It can be shared for evaluation, for an audience or for collaboration. The biggest obstacle to this kind of work is time and tools. Working with video is, to my mind, still the most cumbersome technology related task in education. Anyone who can streamline that process will be a hero to millions.

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.