Crabby Fried Chicken: A Digital Story

Crabby Fried Chicken

Imagine you are trying to teach your 7^th grade students about myths and fables. You have students copy notes from the interactiveboard and read through a couple of myths and fables. Then you have them make a venn diagram comparing/contrasting myths/fables, and even make them write their own myth or fable. However, when the students go to share their stories, you find out several things:

1) They didn’t incorporate the elements of a myth that they were supposed to

2) Their writing doesn’t make much sense

3) Your students are bored.

You're then left wondering how much your students actually retained from the lesson. In case you haven't figured it out yet, this is a true story. Even when students read stories aloud, I’ve found that their thoughts tend to be very scattered. Yet when pictures are involved (such as in digital storytelling), students are able to see their thought pattern and are forced to make what they have written make sense to others in a visual context. Therefore, I decided to create a sample digital story for students to use as a guide for creating their own myth or fable (which you can view here...)

My Encounter with Digital Stories

After using digital storytelling, I can honestly say that it is a way for students to teach themselves about the content of a unit and allows them to have a personal sense of achievement (as well as a final product that is much harder to destroy than posterboard).

Why not make the unit more meaningful and memorable by having students create presentations that include sound, written words, and pictures? Such presentations can not only integrate everything they have learned about the unit, but will entertain the class. Not to mention it will fulfill those pesky standards of integrating technology in the classroom, participating in group interaction, and mastering different styles of writing.

Movie Maker In the Classroom

Digital Storytelling can be used to perform a variety of actions in the classroom. Below are just a few ideas, although I’m sure you can come up with a plethora of your own.

• Present a biography or autobiography
• Perform a booktalk or book review
• Create a fictional story
• Create a documentary of a historical or contemporary event
• Demonstrate ho w to do something (i.e. – a math problem, a writing tutorial, etc.)
• Stage a debate
• Create a public service announcement or advertisement
• Showcase a portfolio

Getting Started

The book suggests using lots of fancy equipment (i.e. – photoediting software, sound recording software, microphone stand, microphone, and scanner). These items are nice to have, but are not at all necessary. To create a digital story, you really only need a computer (preferably a laptop since most come with a built in microphone), and windows movie maker or imovie (where you can record both audio and video), or powerpoint (where you can take images and record audio over them). If you plan on inserting images and recording audio, you need to find copyright friendly images (either taken personally on a digital camera or borrowed from a copyright friendly website such as those listed below).

In fact, most schools have laptop carts available for check out (though if they don’t, the school may have to bite the bullet on purchasing microphones). Once, you have checked out the laptops, make sure the proper programs are downloaded (or find out the protocol for getting them added), and experiment with recording audio/video and using specific program features before turning students loose. There are tons of tutorials on the web for using moviemaker which can help as well!

Movie Maker Resource Kit

Check out the following website: http://edtech.kennesaw.edu/nisa/moviemaker.htm to find out how to use MovieMaker (there are multiple tutorials), follow copyright laws, burn/share movies, and get ideas digital storytelling for the classroom. Also find out about extra equipment you can use with MovieMaker including FlipCameras and free software (file conversion, video editing, image editing, etc.).

Copyright Friendly Images and Music

Copyright Tutorial for Students

http://www.cyberbee.com/cb_copyright.swf

This is a wonderful interactive website on copyright made just for students. It features a group of students asking common copyright questions generated by students.

FreePlay Music

http://www.freeplaymusic.com/

Free AudioClips

http://www.freeaudioclips.com/

Pics4learning

http://www.pics4learning.com/

Publishing Your Digital Story

Once a digital story is created, the question becomes how is it to be stored and shared? Well, there are lots of places you can publish your work. The media center website is a great place to showcase student work! Also, check out these websites for sharing as well!

VoiceThread

http://voicethread.com/

Using this interactive website, you can upload your digital story and take comments on it from other viewers.

KidBlog

http://kidblog.org/home.php

This is a kidfriendly blog where photos, podcasts, movies, digital stories, images, (and pretty much anything else you can think of) can be shared using a educationally secure network.

TeacherTube and Youtube

I won’t actually give the links because I’m going to assume we all know how to access these links. Be very careful about posting student work to these websites as we all know the risks of sharing too much student information.

ThinkQuest

http://www.thinkquest.org/en/

This is an educationally friendly website where students create their own “ThinkQuest” website. It pretty much goes a step further than just sharing one digital story. However, if you have a class and there are multiple stories to share, I would suggest creating a website to showcase them with other classes and schools from around the world!