Digital Storytelling in Education

I chose to make a digital story that I would create as a teacher to help students understand a new concept. Using a topic I had just written about in my SME 301 (Science for Elementary Schools) class, I made my digital story about how light is needed to see color and how different colors reflect and absorb different wavelengths of light. The information presented in this video was based on a couple of the GLCEs for physical science in 3rd grade, in the categories of energy and properties of matter. Since color and light are visual properties of things we see around us, making a video definitely seems like a good tool for presenting it. VoiceThread worked out very well for me in creating the story. I was able to upload images very easily and I had no trouble figuring out the voice recorded comments. I ran into a little trouble trying to use the doodler and talk at the same time. I tended to forget what I wanted to say next (or lose my place reading off the script I created) while I was concentrating on drawing a line in the correct place on the image. The other problem I had was forgetting to switch back and forth between my two identities between pages. I would be using one identity as the last comment on one page and then I would forget to switch back when I started the first comment on the next page. It wasn't a big deal, I just had to redo a couple comments to get the identities correct with the flow of my story. I tried to be a little lighthearted with my story, creating a conversation of sorts between myself and my dog (the other identity). I'm hoping that 3rd grade students would enjoy that kind of thing.

I can see digital storytelling being a useful tool in pretty much every subject area. My story was an example of how it could be used in science, as a way to connect verbal information with a specific visual idea, which I feel is especially helpful in science. Digital stories could be used to same way to present information in social studies, such as displaying a location on a map followed by a picture of people who live in that location or important monuments. Multiple voices could be used to tell stories from history to enhance understanding of certain events. In language arts, either the teacher or students could create videos to serve as book reviews, biography reports, or to orally present poetry. I can also see uses for digital storytelling in math to present calculations or diagrams to students in ways that they can watch and listen to many times when they don't understand something. The doodler function would be useful for pointing out a specific part of a math problem, or a point of interest on a graph or geometric diagram. Videos like this could also work for presenting students' artwork or writing for themselves or parents to view or listen to. The format of a video of images with voice recordings will probably also capture students' interest much better than more traditional methods of presentation. I can see a lot of potential for digital storytelling when I am a teacher. I'm a little uncomfortable with recording my own voice and I tend to be picky about how my recordings sound, but I could probably get over that eventually. Other than that, I can definitely see digital storytelling being a useful tool.

Map Mashup in Children's Literature

Inspired by the website on Google Lit Trips, I decided to create a Lit Trip of my own based on Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books for a 3rd or 4th grade language arts class. The placemarks on the map include brief summaries about the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder, her family, and an overview of the book or books set at each location. I also found web sites created by the historical societies at each of these cities related to Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House books, all of which provide historical background, and information about these locations in the present day. This mashup could serve as a resource for either an in class study of one of these books, or for students' independent reading. This is a technology tool that has the ability to connect literature, biography, history, and geography. Pretty cool, in my opinion. I'm always interested in ways to make literature more accessible to students. I also love tools and activities that make connections across the curriculum.

For older students (upper elementary and middle school), if given lessons in class about how to use Google Maps and create their own mashups, this technology could be used by students themselves to create book reports and other projects. When creating a book report about a book that has a variety of locations discussed or just a unique setting, Google Maps could be a useful tool. Students could also create their own maps in science and social studies to map out important historical events, geographical locations including cultural information, landforms, and geological sites around the world. For myself, I know that locating places I'm learning about or reading about on a map can definitely help increase my understanding, allowing me to explore distances from one location to another or even where a place is in relation to where I live. Map mashups are even more useful because of their ability to include links, photos, and other supplementary information right on the map. This makes this technology interactive and also keeps a variety of information all in one place. I would like to think that students could gain the same understanding through map mashups in the classroom, whether they are teacher or student created.

Here is my map based on the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder:


View Larger Map

Social Bookmarking and Lesson Plans

This week's project involves creating a lesson plan and making use of Delicious social bookmarking site and Google Calendars to organize and share plans and resources related to this lesson. My lesson plan is for 5th grade and covers social studies topics related to life in colonial America prior to the American Revolution. This lesson is structured around these GLCEs from 5th grade social studies: U2.2.2 Describe the life of enslaved Africans and free Africans in the American colonies; U2.3.1 Locate the New England, Middle, and Southern colonies on a map; U2.3.2 Describe the daily life of people in the New England, Middle, and Southern colonies; U2.2.3 Describe colonial life in America from the perspectives of at least three different groups of people (e.g., wealthy landowners, farmers, merchants, indentured servants, laborers and the poor, women, enslaved people, free Africans, and American Indians). It also covers these METs: Perform simple queries on existing databases and report results on an assigned topic, collaborate with classmates using a variety of technology tools to plan, organize, and create a group project, and use Web search engines and built-in search functions of other various resources to locate information

I chose this unit for a few reasons. I have a particular interest for this era of American history, I haven't done much work with social studies yet in my teacher education preparation so I thought I would do some exploring now, and I am interested in teaching 5th grade so I thought it would be beneficial to examine their GLCEs. I used the tag "Colonial America Unit" on Delicious to organize the links to resources I collected for this lesson.

I chose to begin my search for web resources about this topic of Colonial life at the website for Colonial Williamsburg. Here, I found a Kids Zone with online games, fun characters, and interactive descriptions of the types of people that lived in Williamsburg and a virtual tour of the town. I would use this site, either on a screen projector or for students to explore themselves in a computer lab on the first day of the lesson to provide an engaging and interactive overview of the topics to be discussed. This site does a good job of introducing different ways of life in colonial America including farming, slavery, the merchant class, and wealthy landowners.

The next site I plan to use is the history site from Colonial Williamsburg, which is not specifically targeted at kids, but it does provide more detailed information on the topics in this lesson and is not too difficult for 5th graders to understand, especially when the teacher is available to assist them. I would use this website on the second day of the lesson, when the focus is on more in depth information about groups of people, trades, and forms of labor. Students would be split into groups, given an overview of the structure of the website, and asked to look up a different topics such as African Americans, women, children, religion, family life, food, specific trades, holiday traditions, and rules of etiquette (these would be different for each group). The class could then come back together to report their findings and put together an understanding of how people lived and worked in this time period and how it compares to modern life.

The GLCEs also emphasized that students should be able to point out economic and social differences between the people living in the New England, Middle, and Southern colonies during this era. I had a more difficult time finding satisfactory websites to explain this idea, however I did come across a page from Encarta encyclopedia online that describes and organizes this topic very well. Students would be assigned to read about one of the three regions on their own, get together with the other students in the class that read about the same region to discuss and answer a list of questions and then report to the entire class their information. This activity could also help students learn to comprehend text from an encyclopedia, a resource they will likely continue to use in their schooling.

A site called The Abolition of the Slave Trade provides timelines, maps, pictures, and information about the slave trade's history in the U.S. up to the Civil War, its impact on Africa, resistance and abolitionism. This site could be used on the fourth day when the lesson includes a discussion of the Slave Trade and the role of slavery in the colonies. Students could explore this site on their own or in groups, or the teacher could present it on a projector to help students understand the horrors and enormous impact of the Slave Trade on history through images, statistics, and stories. This site does not provide complete information about this topic, so interactive activities, information from books and other resources collected by the teacher should also be used on this day. Google Earth would also be used here to show the route taken by slave traders and ships, from within West Africa to the coast, across the Atlantic, and into the U.S.

Here is the schedule for the lesson:

Bringing the Web to Me

For my project this week I chose to seek out content related to a particular subject area in my teaching. Math is one of my minors and I've mentioned in this blog before about wanting to use technology to help seek out ideas for math instruction, particularly ideas I can use to make math more engaging for students. I've had experience in some of my other teaching classes in searching out resources that would be useful for instruction in reading and writing, but not for math as of yet. This assignment seemed like a good opportunity to poke around on the web and find blogs, news, and other sites related to math education.

I found a couple blogs on math education that I think will be useful, Math Education Research Blog, written by a math ed professor in Sweden, and Homeschool Math Blog, written by a homeschool mom who enjoys teaching math and wants to share her ideas. Both of these blogs post news and research articles about math ed, links to sites with teaching resources, book reviews, and other thoughts about ideas in math education. The Math Education Research Blog also shares lots of good information about math education internationally, which I think will be beneficial for me as a teacher to find fresh ideas from countries other than the U.S. Another site I found, Math Shortcut, features printable math worksheets, lesson plan ideas, and links to online math games for students. Click here to see my public page on these resources from Google reader.

RSS definitely has potential to help me keep my thumb on the most up to date information, resources, and ideas in education. Not every good resource site has RSS feeds, as I found while searching for math ed websites, but many blogs and some sites do frequently post links to sites with useful tools and fresh lesson ideas. I definitely see benefits in checking out sites that others in my field recommend. I can use RSS to stay up to date on education news and research articles to further my professional development and knowledge of what is happening in the education field. To share information with parents, once I've created a strong collection of teaching resource feeds I'll be able to easily share information with parents concerned about some aspect of their child's education, or who just want to know more. For example, using my collection of feeds on math education, I can provide resources and ideas to parents of students either struggling in math or needing math enrichment activities to challenge them. For more technologically aware parents, I can encourage them to subscribe to RSS feeds of websites I've found, class blogs, or even my own blogs as well. I can see RSS as a great communication tool.

On another note, I set up an iGoogle this week, which I'm using to keep Google reader, Gmail, and Blogger all in one place. I also set up a calendar and even a moon phases widget, which is useful for some of the things I'm doing in SME 301 right now. I also subscribed to a couple color guard websites to stay up to date on that information. I'm hoping to add a few more of my own personal feeds to my reader soon.