ICT teacher handbook/Digital story telling

The focus of this activity is to develop a digital story for a teaching-learning situation - examples, creating a photo essay for documenting an event or a place, comic strips to tell a story (graphic novels) and an audio recording for sharing understanding. The focus on all of these activities is to demonstrate possibilities of using digital stories to express understanding and learning without focusing exclusively on text based methods.

Objectives

1. Capturing information in multiple (non-only-textual) ways;
2. Combining text, graphic and audio visual methods, developing a story and scripting by combining multiple digital methods; digital stories can be story books; audio or video or a combination of these
3. Digital stories for communication in classrooms; in the case of language teaching-learning how this can be used for learning and assessment. It can be used to document community institutions for social science topics. It can be used to document nature / natural events for science topics.
4. Evaluation of digital stories (for teachers for assessment)
5. Possibilities for inclusion using digital story telling (for teachers for children with different learning needs and abilities)

Understanding digital stories

Take a given multimedia communication and discuss with the students the overall message and the role and effectiveness of each of the pieces of the digital story in communicating the idea. For example, with a sequence story or animation film, ask the children to tell the story.

Notes for the teacher

1. Why has a video been used for a particular message or could it have been captured (better) by a photograph?
2. What pictures/ images have been captured? How are they important?
3. How different media (audio, video, image) are different?
4. When to use what?

Student Outcomes

1. Comprehension, verbal (oral) expression from a given story/ resource
2. Making a story line for a given idea. This is likely to be an iterative process, initially many 'story ideas' can be brain stormed by the students and then a few selected, by explicitly assessing these stories on parameters they use
3. Identify key ideas for getting photos / images/ drawing pictures

Making a story – Photo Image Essay

Here, we have to create a photo / image essay. This could be either be a documentation of an event or a set of images that can be tied to tell a story or an explanation of a process. These photographs could either be downloaded from the internet or taken by the participants (either through a camera, web camera, or a scanner) or created using MyPaint. For different processes, this will be different.

1. We can take photographs, add downloaded pictures and tell a story. Stitch the photographs in a slide show.
2. When we work for language lessons, we have to help create the story line using related pictures – related to a lesson/ idea/ author that we want to explore. It can be linked to the textbook chapter/ lesson; it need not be.
3. Even a mind map with images, notes is a story only!!

In language teaching-learning we have discussed two parts – one is the language itself (the grammar, figures of speech, the comprehension, vocabulary, etc); the second is the culture/ ideas that a particular lesson can be used to talk about.

Student Outcomes

1. Students must coherently tell a story
2. Making a story line (or story lines) for a given idea
3. Creating, accessing, modifying images and photos
4. Adding descriptive text to develop stories
5. Technical skills of combining images and text (mind map, text document or presentation)
6. Are students able to document details well? Do they have meta knowledge of sources of information, permissions, disclaimers etc.
7. Other outcomes will depend on the specific objectives of the digital story, whether of supporting deeper understanding of community/social institutions (in case of social science), of nature and natural processes/events (in case of science) and of expression/production (in case of language). Elements of art and music can also be blended into the digital story by the students. The art and music teachers can play an important role in facilitating this.

Making a story with created images

Creating an image using paint/ drawing applications. Take a created digital art and combine with photographs. Together, tell a story with captions/ text. This can be fully written text or comic strip like phrases, etc. As mentioned, the art teacher can play an important role in facilitating this.

Student Outcomes

More methods of digital image creation (photograph, mypaint, scanner, etc)

Editing Images and Adding text

1. Editing the image for size, format, scaling and cropping, inserting into a document. Adding a caption to an image and placing it with text. Editing images to improve image quality.
2. Inserting text into images. Adding descriptive texts and labels to an image; sequencing and telling a story.

Student Outcomes

1. Image editing skills
2. How to combining images with documents
3. Vocabulary and writing skills
4. Combining text and non-textual methods for communicating
5. Sequencing images to tell a story
6. Ability to tell a story

Again this will differ for different purposes.

For a language lesson, you will assess the following:

1. Coherence and the flow of story
2. Language style
3. Vocabulary
4. Richness of ideas and extensions presented
5. Linking of ideas

For a social science/ project work, we can assess the following:

1. Coherence and the flow of story
2. Richness of ideas and extensions presented
3. How critical questions are asked and expressed, how dilemmas and challenges are explored
4. Linking of ideas

Other (picture/image) activities

1. Create a process flow (science) diagram and label it. (Using draw tools, scan from hand drawn process charts and take a screenshot from an existing image of a diagram/ process chart.
2. Even a Geogebra file is one such image / text story.
3. Explaining an experiment using screenshots from simulations is an example.

Video narrations

1. Shoot a video clip (of around 1 minute) to document any process or event.
2. Using a voice recorder, narrate the explanation, description or commentary of the process or event to create an audio clip.

Student Outcomes

1. Learn how to make a short video clip
2. Story telling and narration
3. Combining images and audio/ video to make a film
4. Developing a script, and tell a story

Assessment of digital stories

Digital stories can be used for assessment of student learning.

1. How well story is developed?
2. The quality of the material.
3. The quality of the language
4. Analysing information presented in multiple formats
5. How well ideas are connected?
6. Accuracy
7. How can we use this for children with different needs?