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.

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: