Digital Storytelling
Digital storytelling means to create a narrative and produce and distribute it for an audience using digital media. It is a multi-modal form of presentation, including images, video, spoken word and music (Explain Everything, 2018, para. 2). Today digital storytelling is easy to facilitate in the classroom, with the rise of mobile technology and apps like Explain Everything there any many tools easily available to use (Davis & Foley, 2016, p. 317).
Explain Everything
Explain Everything is a Web 2.0 tool that allows you to create multi-modal presentations that can be cast to an Interactive Whiteboard (IWB). The main reason I had for using this tool was that you can “Instruct in Real time” (Explain Everything, 2018, para. 2), using images, voice over and text. You can also quickly to share your video onto a YouTube account. Explain Everything is accompanied by a mobile app, mobile technology is increasing accessibility for people worldwide as mobile phone ownership has soared in recent years (Alexander, 2011, pp.139-140). The addition of the app made it more appealing for me and my students, as we were able to work on our stories from anywhere.
Cooperative Learning
Using Explain Everything for digital storytelling in the classroom, means you can create assessments that have the Cooperative learning technique Jigsaw II embedded within the task. Cooperative learning is proven to increase students’ academic success and improve students views about themselves and their classmates (Moskowitz, Schaeffer & Schnaps, 1983, p. 687). Jigsaw II is a learning technique, where students are split into small groups and each tasked with a portion of the overall project (Moskowitz, Schaeffer & Schnaps, 1983, p. 688).
The Drama assessment task was to work in small groups to produce a digital story about one aspect of Stephen Sondheim’s life and career. Each student was given a specific role within the group; voice over artist, editing, image consultant, director, head of research.This made the task into a real-world activity which increases engagement because the task becomes more relevant to the students (Taylor & Parsons, 2011, p. 12) Incorporating “task specialization” into students’ roles also encouraged them each group member to fulfil their role successfully for the group to achieve (Slavin, 1983, p. 442).
This task was done at the end of the learning cycle as a summative assessment piece. Students were required to work together to create their stories and to provide feedback on one other groups work. The aim of the projects was to create a class story that incorporated one of the aspects from each group.
References
Alexander, B. (2017). The New Digital Storytelling: Creating Narratives with New Media--Revised and Updated Edition. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, LLC.
Davis, A., & Foley, L. (2016). Digital Storytelling. In B. Guzzetti, & M. Lesley (Eds.), Handbook of Research on the Societal Impact of Digital Media (pp. 317-342). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. doi:10.4018/978-1-4666-8310-5.ch013.
Explain Everything. (2018). Explain Everything: Education. Retrieved from https://explaineverything.com/education/
Harrington, S. (2018, May 5). Stephan Sondheim [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo1naMB8Hd4
Slavin, R. E. (1983). When does cooperative learning increase student achievement?. Psychological bulletin, 94(3), 429.
Taylor, L. & Parsons, J. (2011). Improving Student Engagement. Current Issues in Education,14(1). Retrieved from http://cie.asu.edu/
Moskowitz, J. M., Malvin, J. H., Schaeffer, G. A., & Schaps, E. (1983). Evaluation of a cooperative learning strategy. American Educational Research Journal, 20(4), 687-696. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Joel_Moskowitz/publication/250184550_Evaluation_of_a_Cooperative_Learning_Strategy/links/54ecab4a0cf27fbfd7713f80/Evaluation-of-a-Cooperative-Learning-Strategy.pdf