Techszewski

A Wrinkle in Times

You that know part of the book where Meg hears her muffled father's voice speaking to her from behind the grip of IT? That's kind of like blogging in China. I haven't been able to post to this blog for months now. Not even sure this will get thru. It is almost 2010, right? And China did send a man to the moon recently. Why can't I get to my blog? The two issues are thinly connected, but still I complain.

I have been blogging on my local school-based blogs. Teach Me This focuses on my edu-gaming work, while my Middle School Tech Tips shares what I do as a technology integration specialist.

Until I relocate or find a way around IT, I'll have to post there.

Games-Based Learning Conference 2010

With the rise of electronic entertainment, we are seeing games reach a very prominent status in everyday life. Modern culture is increasingly dominated by electronics, and the new games that electronics have made possible are compelling creations that suck away huge amounts of time. At such a time of adjustment, it's a good idea to go back to the roots of games, and think about why they exist in every human culture, why children of all ages play them, and what important role they play in the development of our brains. - From Raph Koster's Theory of Fun

I've been to a lot of conferences. And most of them are often disappointing because the presenters are not effective public speakers or the workshop sessions do not really match the description in the conference program. This conference was different. I left inspired to teach with games and with a long list of valuable resources. More importantly, I left with important ideas to share with colleagues and not just a laundry list of links to add to my delicious account. The research around the role of electronic games in learning continues to expand. MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech (GO JACKETS!) Indiana and Wisconsin Universities all recognize that computer games can add to our explorations of determining what works in our classrooms. What's often misunderstood by many parents and teachers is that there's a HUGE difference between the games Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty and games such as Civilization, Animal Crossing, Little Big Planet and MYST.

The WOW STUFF: Carnegie Mellon Professor Jesse Schell's talk. Create situations for students that demand SHARING of ideas, talents, skill-sets. Replace grading system with an Experience Point system. Similar to how video games are structured, students earn points and level-up by completing assignments and tasks. No gray area for how you're doing in the class.

Gaming Literacy. Ewen McIntosh's talk. Gaming is its own literacy, part of the New Media literacies. There is a growing chasm between schools that continue the entrenched model of teaching to the test and those that recognize a need to spend more time clarifying what does it mean to be literate in the Digital Age.

Games that support writing development. As an English teacher and digital storytelling facilitator, I'm interested in the grammar of not only quality literature, but also that cross-section between literature, movies and now games. What literacies do we develop by interacting with a game version of a classic novel? By deconstructing a movie, graphic novel or game version of the Odyssey? By creating our own version or a choose your own adventure game version? Tim Rylands has been touring the UK schools showing teachers and students how to use the classic game MYST to spark creative writing as well many other a few other games-based writing projects. There's a lot potential in the using the Choose Your Own Adventure story model for engaging reluctant writers. I plan to test out a few ideas where students create interactive fiction/CYOA stories using either iWeb, Wikispaces or an online tool that allows you to then make your story available via the iTunes store to be played/read on the iTouch/Phone/Pad.

Scotland's Consolarium. Maybe because it's much smaller compared to the UK and US that this country is able to convince so many of their schools that games-based learning is effective practice. The Consolarium site documents clearly the work they've accomplished and makes it accessible to all teachers via their national intranet. Spend a few minutes checking out their Sharing Practice section and you'll get a sense of what "games-based learning" means in a classroom context. Ollie Bray and Derek Robertson were excellent representatives and speakers on the work of the Consolarium. Be sure to invite them to your next edu-tech conference!

Games and Simulations. We've come a long way since Oregon Trail, Math Blasters and Carmen San Diego. Or have we? Tom Snyder Productions was the pioneer in the US in this field. The Decisions, Decisions series is still one of the most effective pieces of educational technology software I've used in my nearly twenty years of teaching. But they are no longer in business. In their place are companies like Playgen.com that allow free access to their web-based simulations or "serious games" in hopes you'll hire them to develop a simulation for your company, school or learning need.

TOOLS for making your own games. It keeps getting easier, but that doesn't mean students are making better games. The same principle applies to Powerpoint presentations, digital stories, podcasts, short films - kids need plenty of practice to proficiently produce anything that makes sense. In addition to programming /game-making tools like Scratch and Alice, you can now use the game engines Unity or Platinum Sandbox. The XBox even has an easy tool for making games - Kodu. Looking forward to testing that out. 2DIY is another set of game-making tools. The Nintendo DS now has a Do It Yourself game-maker called WarioWare.

There's much more to review here, but for me it was the ideas that I took away that are most important to share. Two of them resonated with me: James Huggins of Made in Me reminded us that too often the emphasis is on the relationship of the child to the software instead of encouraging the child's relationship with the natural world. His Land of Me game provided an engaging story development tool that then provides items the child can print out that encourages play based on what was created in the game.

The second idea, more an observation of schools' resistance to adopting practices that clearly work for children, was related to Dorothy Heathcote's drama in education legacy. For close to fifty years, her work has engaged children in nearly all environments. She's proven that drama is a powerful tool for helping students achieve meaningful learning, yet drama in education is still only included in 25% of our schools - maybe less. In twenty-five years, will this be the same attitude of games-based learning?

And now the games.

• Farmville - Facebook game that raised over $1 million for Haiti earth quake repairs
• Little Big Planet - PS3 game that has over 2 million user-generated levels from people all over the world
• UK Channel 4 History Games - Trafalgar Origins, Bow Street Runner and 1066 are web-based
• Routes to Better Science - Great set of games and even better mystery to unravel using your science clues
• Nintendo DS Games being used in schools - Dr Kawashima's Brain Training, Professor Layton

 

• Games for Health Education? Lots of 'em online. Smokescreen is much more than a game.
• Scribble Nauts - Anything your imagination can dream up.
• JASON science explorations - All connected to the huge success of the JASON project
• MIT & Singapore Labs Collaboration
• Games for Change - Can electronic games really save the planet?
• National Geographic Games
• Game Review - I use these to help teach students how to write a critique of a game.
• Video games with an agenda - Great examples
• Learning Chinese characters via a game in Korean?
• 221B - The Game is Afoot! Sherlock Holmes actually never says this in any of the stories, but maybe in this game.
• Playing History - Great collection of educational games reviewed by many teachers and students

A few other reviews of the conference from other attendees: Dawn Hallybone , Ben Betts

Spring Fever

It's a new season so that must mean it's time for me to post to my blog. It's not that I don't have a lot to say. I'd just rather be doing other things than sitting in front of my computer. I have much to say about digital storytelling and using technology effectively in educational settings. A few weeks ago, my school was fortunate to bring Scott McCloud to speak about his work in comics. If you have not seen his TED talk, grab something to eat and plop yourself down in front of your computer for twenty minutes of the best live digital storytelling I've seen since Dana Atchley's Next Exit performance. Scott uses only a series of slides behind him to help him tell the story of his life in comics, but he really makes it compelling by his choice of images and the pace at which he uses them. My head is still swimming with ideas from his talk. I had so many students and teachers tell me afterwards that his presentation was the most enjoyable they've seen in all of the Powerpoints they've been subjected to over the years.

Since Scott's talk I've been thinking a lot about tools and online resources to help teachers and students tell an effective story. It's been almost five years since I finished my thesis on digital storytelling in the classroom and I still contend that if we expect students and teachers to use technology effectively we need to teach them HOW to tell a good story. Not so much the ability to tell a good oral story, but how to select and combine images, text and audio that effectively conveys their message.

I'm embarrassed that most of the links on the right side of this blog are probably obsolete. I haven't updated them in years. But that will change soon. I've set out to find the best tools/resources online that teach story. I'm casting the net wide and looking at everything from radio (NPR) to comics sites, such as Scott's. There are many places on the web you can watch, listen, read and even create a story, but there's still very few places that have the specific purpose of helping teachers teach story. And I'm not just talking about teaching traditional storytelling. We have drifted far from our ability to relate information in an engaging way. Maybe that's why I don't blog frequently. I'm skeptical that it's that effective of a tool. It's definitely much better than Twitter or Facebook. At least that's where I'm at currently in my opinions on social networking tools.

So send your sites my way. Where on the web can we point teachers and students to for help in improving their story skills?

My Proudest Moment

A few months ago, I set a goal for this year to help produce 500 digital stories. I'm 75 digital stories closer to the finish line. With the Spanish digital stories and now this set, I'm at about 120. But it's not about the numbers.

The most recent project involved the 6th Grade and focused on an accomplishment or proud moment. The project team consisted of four classroom teachers, myself and two very patient and flexible computer lab teachers. I met with the classroom teachers prior to launching the project and walked them through the process of completing a digital story. I'm a big fan of providing students with a template of what you expect them to complete, in addition to sharing with them a a finished digital story that illustrates what you expect them to do. For both Windows MovieMaker and iMovie (one class worked in the Mac Lab), I created a template where the students would open it and then have each step of the project illustrated for them in a short video. Still not sure how effective this was, but it cut down on requiring me to give a lot of direction instruction in MovieMaker and iMovie.

We met for 40 minutes each day. Spent about ten days writing our stories. Each student has a blog so we had them post a draft of their story to their blog and then told students to read and comment on each other's stories. Not surprisingly, 6th graders are not the most effective story coaches. It's still a  big challenge for a teacher to provide timely feedback to each student, but I find that this is what makes the difference between a narrated slideshow and an effective digital story. After students used Audacity to record their voice overs, they exported them as an mp3 and uploaded it to their blog to receive feedback on that. The feedback was sparse as many students were eager to move on to gathering images for their story and did not leave that many comments for the audio version of the story. The student's voice is the most engaging part of a digital story. Unfortunately, schools are not quiet places. We don't have that many quiet spaces and even with designating empty classrooms as quiet recording spaces, students still had some background noise in their voice overs. The kids can filter it out, but most adults stop listening once you hear some other voice in the background or the papers rustling. Next time, I think I'll tighten that process by using a schedule with time slots. The teachers can help by listening to students read the first section of their story aloud and if they sound ready, the student's name would be added to the recording queue. During the recording, we could pair each student with an adult or student who has just completed his recording who will oversee the process and ensure that the environment is quiet. The voice over is too valuable to leave to the student to handle alone.

I think a key component of this project was the flexibility of the
teachers. We had a window of about a month's time for the project, but
everybody wanted quality work and extended the time for students to
write and receive feedback on their stories. I'd much rather spend more
time on the script writing and less on making the final movie look more
polished. Few students used music or transitions and I don't think we
lost much. In total, I think the project took 6 weeks.

We uploaded the completed digital stories to our school YouTube channel. It was the easiest place to put them all (although I don't like all of the Promoted Videos that come up when you try to watch a kid-friendly movie). I have most of the supporting documents for this project on this wiki. Will be adding more soon.

 

Distinguished Colleagues

What happens when you cram a posh hotel conference room with sixty Apple Distinguished Educators for a week of geeking out on their MacBooks? Add to that Singapore's lovely sights and soothing sun rays and you can expect some exciting results.

I was fortunate to spend a majority of the time collaborating on a project with Amanda DeCardy and Jonathan Chambers, two of my colleagues from Shanghai American School. You would think that during the course of the school year we have several opportunities for professional development, but for technology PD we are often the ones providing the workshops, leaving little time for us to get together and pool our many talents, resources and ideas. We meet on a monthly basis and swap dozens of emails yet this is not the same as collaborating on a project that is meant for teachers to actually use with their students.

For several years, Apple has held week long institutes that provide invaluable opportunities for Mac-savvy educators to network, discuss educational technology challenges and often produce a project that showcases effective technology integration. I pitched the idea of having students collect stories from elders in their communities about how their city has changed. Amanda coined the project's title of "Wisdom Lost, Wisdom Found" and that really provided the context for the project. With any digital storytelling project, providing a clear purpose for why you're creating stories always helps. We were off and running from there. In the solution section of my thesis on digital storytelling, I suggested that providing teachers and students with a digital story template will improve the story teaching part of the project. Teachers and students need more than a few video tutorials on the technical side of creating a digital story. It only took me three years to finally follow through on this idea. In our project, we provide director's cut style videos that help teachers and students prepare for the field interview. We created a scaffolded approach to the editing process, detailing three options (quick and simple, moderate editing, advanced editing) for creating the final digital story. Check out the project: Wisdom Lost, Wisdom Found. See also iTooth by David Gran and Mikey McKillip.

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With all of those MacBooks in one room, you can bet there were many resources that people wanted to share. Below is a quick list shared by the group. Thanks to David Gran for his descriptions of each resource. I've reordered the list ranking them according to my preference. See his post about the conference here.

1. ClassTools - Free Flash-based games that you can modify for your lessons.
2. iTunes U - geared for higher ed. These are the type of schools we're preparing students for!
3. Sokoban game - best simple game that really challenges students' logic/spatial skills.
4. Skitch screen capture and manipulation, not sure how it works here in Asia, but I love the idea.
5. Planbook is web based planner that allows you to attach document. Throw away those paper calendars!
6. 30 Second Bunny Theater teaches students about story structure (it really does).
7. CosmoPod allows you to download and convert online movies from almost any set, similar to TubeTV.
8. Little Geometry - like most items on this list, it's Mac-only, but a very powerful little set of tools
9. Sailling Software provides applications that let you use your mobile phone to access and control your iTunes libraries, and even work as a remote control for your computer.
10. The Voices of Asia is a new blog authored by Apple Distinguished Educators in Asia.
11. Picture Sync allows you to upload your pictures to multiple online sites at once (i.e. Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Bubbleshare, Photobucket).
12. Mousepose - allows your keyboard to show up on the screen.
13. Xtranormal - create your own animations just by typing in text.
14. Diigo, the social bookmarking tool, can be used to correct student text through highlights and sticky notes.
15. ...and it's about holiday time, don't forget to go elf yourself.
16. Virtual Box allows you to run Windows or Linux on your mac (if that's your thing).

Scratching the Surface

My return to Boston this summer was primarily to see my family and friends. Second fiddle was the Scratch conference held at MIT. I love conferences during the summer. Teachers rarely turn their brains off completely from thinking of school, but during July and August you're removed far enough from your daily routines to think about school in a different way. Today was Day 1 of a gathering of people around the world who are using the free Scratch software developed by MIT. This year, I used this program with an after-school group of students interested in learning how to make video games. We didn't get very far into the program. I made the mistake of introducing it alongside other free game-making programs. The students were drawn more to the web-based Flash games. I had had plans to develop a whole course to teach video game creation through Scratch, but when the number of students dropped to 3 it lost its priority. This conference, though, has recharged my interest and I'm looking forward to pitching several ideas from this conference to my staff.

The key question for most teachers at the conference was how do I introduce Scratch to students and teachers? For me, the question had more to do with scaffolding the introduction of more complex coding concepts; moving students and teachers beyond the basics of what looks like something made with Powerpoint. The ready-to-use Scratch cards are perfect for getting the basics down. And the learnscratch.org site has some of the best sequenced lessons for teachers and students to work through. I think to get at more complex chunks of code, students could be presented with remixing challenges where they need to take someone else's Scratch project and manipulate the speed of a object on the screen. With this approach, you're asking students to deconstruct a Scratch project made by another student. This is where the scaffolding can work well. After students have solved one challenge, you introduce more challenges like adding speech bubbles, collision detection and loops.

Another strategy, I'll try is using themed Scratch projects to hook particular students and teachers. There's a huge number of anime projects on the Scratch website. The math and science concepts are growing but I haven't found many that do more than regurgitate information from a text book. Several presenters talked about using role-play to help students think through the code of their project. With a few students on stage, they would physically walk-through the code instructions behaving as if they were the objects on the screen. Audience members could also provide feed-back on solving particular challenges, such as how to create collision detection between two objects. This approach was a welcomed surprise to how I've seen programming taught in the past. Using creative movement to help students physically understand how if-then procedures work will appeal to many students.

I was really impressed with how much true constructivist and constructionist learning I heard discussed at this conference. For years, I've been on the fence about constructionist learning. My biggest qualm has been that it just doesn't fit with traditional test-driven classrooms. And that's exactly what Seymour Papert and Mitch Resnick responded to with their creation of tools like LOGO and Scratch to allow students to "imagine, create, play, share, experiment, and reflect." That might not be the exact cycle, but you get the idea. During the session on the ScratchEd site that's meant to serve the needs of educators using Scratch, I heard many teachers trying to map the entrenched school model onto Scratch, asking for resources to help use Scratch to teach their curriculum. I was one of them. I wish there were schools with a Media Lab type approach to learning. Places where students were truly encouraged to use their personal interest in a subject to guide their learning. I know this sounds like Montessori education, but constructionist learning theory is different. It's hard to document. I'll come back to it in a later post. Mitch's enthusiasm for creativity in education made me feel like I wasn't necessarily at an edu-tech conference. It was a gathering of people who believed in students and their ability to create, collaborate and demonstrate an amazing range of, sorry I can't avoid using it, 21st century skills.

A presenter used the term "safe failure" in his talk, the idea that Scratch provided opportunities for students to set out to build something and totally fall flat on their faces and not have any negative consequences attached to it. There may be some self-imposed ones, but those too are important. Schools have utterly failed at equipping students with basic problem-solving skills. I think this is largely due to the infrequency of these safe failure moments in academic settings.

Many sessions featured Scratch use for making video games, both with educational and entertainment goals. What I noticed in nearly all the presentations is the absence of any specific video-game teaching. This is a huge field and lots has been written about game design for teens. Maybe direct teaching is in conflict with constructionism. That's what I've never been able to resolve. The balance between assessing what skills the teacher needs to provide to the student and what you think is developmentally appropriate for them to discover on their own, that's the real challenge. There's a course that Bernie Dodge teaches where he has the teachers design board games and introduces the fundamentals of engaging games. I'll try a modified version of this with students this year. Creating a good game is hard. Why reinvent the wheel. Have students use games that already work, but just change the content to fit your needs. This I know is the complete opposite of constructionism, but I feel it's an important step before asking a student to create a game that's meant to teach or make a point. I found this book during a lunch break that really helps non-game designers understand the challenges behind making an engaging game.

This is similar to the main challenge I find in helping students create effective digital stories. You need to teach them how to do it. Why not give them stories and ask them to find the images that match the script, making changes along the way to add their unique voice to the story. I plan to use this scaffolding approach often this year for most projects that require students to create any kind of interactive multimedia project.

There was also a lot of talk at the conference about using Scratch to create and share stories among students in various countries around the world. The Scratch website makes the sharing part easy. I'll be watching to see how people interpret "story" and look for opportunities to incorporate digital storytelling practices. I'll be sure to include Scratch in my presentation on current approaches to digital storytelling at the Asian Digital Storytelling Festival in September.

Converting Essay to Digital Story: Lessons Learned

Let me get my ranting out of the way first. I hate Windows. And I hate MovieMaker. I'm getting my Made on a Mac tattoo re-inked this weekend. When it comes to creating multimedia projects on a PC, there are many options, but which ones are any good? I've yet to complete a project with a group of students on the PC that wasn't plagued by freakish glitches with file path names, program freezes, or just general computers behaving badly. In my test run of the program, I had few problems recording my voice over in Audacity, importing my audio and images, syncing everything, adding a title, and exporting the finished movie. But I've done this before. The key difference is that I did this all in one 90 minute long sitting. MovieMaker does something that makes it nearly impossible for students to work on a project over a few class periods. When students opened their projects on their second day, they were met with big red X's in place of their images and audio that they had spend an hour syncing the day before. Most times you can just double-click on the images and reconnect the path. It's misleading when you tell students to import their images and audio because that's not what MovieMaker does. It saves the target source. Why? In iMovie, when you import files becomes part of the project file. You don't have to worry about the file after that. Not with MovieMaker. If you move your images or audio files, you might as well start over. I had switched to MovieMaker from Photostory because it was easier to adjust the length of time an image stays on the screen. Photostory also has that odd path name glitch. Very frustrating because it makes no sense and it's nearly impossible to explain to students. The tech savvy ones figure it out and can work around it, but for the rest of the class they become intensely frustrated and squander valuable editing time dealing with these PC pitfalls.

I just wrapped up a digital storytelling project where students converted an essay they wrote about a country in Africa. Instead of the usual Powerpoint (the only reliable multimedia tool for the PC) to share their work, the teacher wanted to try something new. I created a template to help students see how they could convert their thesis statements to focus questions of a story. The focus question set up a story that would follow one of the following story models: Cause-Effect, Compare-Contrast, Analyze-Persuade, Describe-Conclude. Bernajean Porter puts these types of digital stories in the Beyond Words category. Different from the personal narrative, but still meant to move the audience in some way. That part, writing and creating multimedia projects that do more than just regurtitate facts is the real challenge for students.

I knew this would be challenging for most of the students, but it's an important skill for them to acquire. The sample story I created helped many see what we wanted. Overall, I'm very pleased the with the final projects. I get a sense that they learned much more than just facts about the countries they researched. This project brings my total of student-produced digital stories to around 500. With each project, I learn many new lessons. Aside from my profound dislike of MovieMaker, I'll take much away from this round of digital stories.

Lesson #1 Using a wiki to provide feedback to students during the script writing process is an easy, valuable tool to include. Although only a few students used the wiki, it was really helpful to
them in improving the quality of their scripts. The discussion forum on Wikispaces was simple and effective.

Lesson #2 Students have no idea how to find images for ideas, concepts, emotions, etc. It was fun to peak
over their shoulders as they were punching into Google Images phrases such as "political corruption in Nigeria" or "economic strife." Students need lots of practice in activities like assigning captions to
pictures or finding images for sections of a script. These are the types of short visual and media literacy activities that are essential to developing strong digital storytelling skills.

Lesson #3: No matter how many times you show students how to use the basic components of a program only your top 10% will remember it when it comes time for them to apply what you've shown them (and that 10% probably is tech savvy enough to figure things out on their own). Students still need written instructions on the step-by-step approach to the basic steps like editing and importing images and audio. I probably could have created a short movie that walks them thru the steps, but I'm lazy these days. Next time.

Lesson #4: When editing, students need a mouse and a set of headphones. Looking around the classroom, watching the students all listening to their stories with headphones was a great snap-shot of really engaging project-based learning.

Lesson 5: You always need more time than you planned for. We had 80 minute classes, but it was a tight schedule. They only had two days of work on the computer. Students who tried to download MovieMaker at home only found frustration when the red X's appeared because of the lack of portability of the program.

Lesson 6: Students need to be taught how to name files with descriptors that help identify it. Many students opened MovieMaker, started working then saved their project as "Movie" or "soc studies prj."


I'm fairly certain that for most students this was the first time they've been asked to "tell a story" that moved the audience. Many came close. A few really nailed it. Some still don't know the difference between a story and a report. This takes practice. I think teachers often are reluctant to take on a project like this because the end results can be less than stellar. But this is when teachers need to be reminded that we often ask students to apply many skills repeatedly. Despite being assigned dozens of Powerpoint presentations in their school career, only a third of most classes have students creating engaging and effective presentations. I still remain convinced that a digital storytelling project forces students to develop, practice, and apply the wide range of visual and media literacy skills that will produce truly digitally literate students.

ICTs, Digital Literacy and Digital Storytelling

 

I'm changing my job title from Technology Integration Specialist to ICT Integration Specialist. Maybe then I'll get a chance to demonstrate how technology in educational settings is linked to developing students' digital literacy skills and not a separate set of software skills. Also, maybe then teachers won't confuse me with the person who was hired to fix their computer. ICT Standards have made my job a lot easier. When teachers are presented with a set of standards that emphasize effective communication with technology they often feel that this makes more sense to them than "doing technology for technology's sake." 

When we talk about 21st century skills for our schools, one key strand is digital literacy. While some teachers and administrators see these terms as buzz words that muddle school reform conversations, it can't be denied that technology use is integral to the development of students' current literacy skills. The ICVET website explains that:

Today’s technology driven society also requires digital literacy, which means that an individual can read and write digitally in order to 'access the Internet; find, manage and edit digital information; join in communications; and otherwise engage with an online information and communications network...' (Blackall, L 2005). Digital literacy also includes an ability to 'identify…integrate, evaluate, analyse and synthesize digital resources, construct new knowledge, create media expressions, and communicate with others, in the context of specific life situations, in order to enable constructive social action; and to reflect upon this process' (DigEuLit project, 2006).

According to these definitions, some may say that Facebook has facilitated students' digital literacy skills more than their daily classroom work.  I've spent the last ten years helping students and teachers communicate information in story form using technology. To me, digital storytelling helps develop story literacy, media literacy, and visual literacy. When implementing a digital storytelling project and teachers address the skills associated with these three literacies then we're on the path of developing digitally literate students.

Eliot Eisner wrote in The Kind of Schools We Need that "what we ought to be developing in our schools is not a narrow array of literacy skills limited to a restrictive range of meaning systems, but a spectrum of literacies...to serve as a vision of what our schools should strive to achieve." I'd also include procedural literacy as a component of digital literacy. Students who can use entry-level programming tools, such as Scratch or ALICE are learning a set of skills that transcend manipulating a machine. They are learning the key steps of the iterative design process that will be a part of many 21st century jobs.

I just finished Jason Ohler's new book Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning, and Creativity. When I was writing my thesis on Supporting Digital Storytelling in Grades 4-12 (Download TB_thesis_2008_edits.doc), I found the earlier draft of this book on his website. Thrilled at the clear language he used and his support of Kieran Egan's storytelling work, I felt his first draft was the best book to date on helping teachers understand digital storytelling in the context of the classroom and within the larger pedagogical domain of "So, why is this important?" Unfortunately, it was too good. I hit a wall with my thesis, feeling deflated that he'd beat me to the punch, and said everything I had planned to say. But I pushed on and found that I still had a lot to say about the challenges teachers face in planning a successful digital storytelling project and the continuing challenge of how exactly do we teach students to tell a story. This version of his book covers it all - the important connection between communicating with digital tools and literacy development, visualizing story development, media grammar, and recommendations for necessary computer equipment.

I really feel that this book should be required reading for all teachers. One of Ohler's frequent reminders to teachers is "story first, technology second." But I find that when I mention "story" to teachers they feel that this is a step backwards in their drive to develop 21st century learners. I've got to find a new term. Telling a good story is hard, just as is writing an engaging five paragraph essay. It's often overlooked that students receive far more drill in essay writing than story practice. In every digital storytelling workshop I've run, when I ask participants to tell a story about themselves, it is a very foreign experience for them. Telling an engaging, convincing story should be a skill that we impart to our students (as well as making sure they can tell at least one good joke). Although story does not appear in many ICT documents, it does remind that us that story is one of the oldest ways that information has been communicated, and it should not be abandoned in the Information Age. 

We need to make sure we give students the tools to create engaging digital stories, podcasts, Powerpoints, animations, and larger multimedia productions. The story spine and story mapping templates were just a few resources from Ohler's book that I'm looking forward to testing out with students soon.

Story Spine

Once upon a time...
Everyday...
But one day...
Because of that... (repeat three times or as often as necessary) Until finally...
Ever since then...
And the moral of the story is...(optional)

Virtual Portrait of a Story (VPS)

A digital story adds the new challenge of doing what Bernajean Porter refers to as "dancing text, images and audio together on the screen."  A key step that is easily confused with storyboarding is what Ohler refers to as "story mapping." The simple visualization tools Ohler encourages are invaluable to teachers who feel very comfortable with a template for students to follow. Porter's book DigiTales: The Art of Telling Digital Stories is another excellent resource for teachers wondering what digital storytelling has to offer them.

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Visual Grammar: My 2 Cents

I spent the last two weeks working with middle school students on two projects that rely heavily on careful selection of images to support what they're trying to say. Even after ten years of helping students with multimedia projects that require them to select an image to convey an idea or support a part of a voice over, I'm stunned at how some students have no idea of where to begin when it comes to finding an image to go along with statements like "My mom is very nice" or "I use to live in Mexico." I don't think it's a simple case of right-brain vs. left-brain. For all the time I've spent researching how to help students write an engaging script for a digital story, I could write just as much about the challenges students face in thinking visually.

I first heard the term "visual grammar" from Joe Brennan during an interview with him on his approaches to digital storytelling. His job title of Visual Literacy Instructor was new to me. I was more than a bit jealous when he told me he spent most of this time helping students acquire the essential media literacy skills that so many school curricula omit. We expect students to use tools like Powerpoint, PhotoStory and iMovie but often overlook the pre-requisites to effectively using these programs. By effective, I don't mean they know how to add transitions, crop or import images. Students need to learn how to do what Bernajean Porter (read Beyond Words) refers to "dancing text, images and audio together" so that the elements convey an intended point. Few students pick this skill up without explicit instruction.

While it's not hard for students to locate images with the help of Google, Flickr, and Yahoo, they tend to select vague and literal interpretations of what they're trying to say. It would be a fantastic plug-in for Google Images and other image databases if you were prompted with questions that helped narrow your search to better match your intended image need. Now, we wouldn't need this if students understood and practiced Boolean search methods. But even they did use "quotes" and + or - in their keyword searches, they still wouldn't be thinking of what would be the best image for their script. A student was looking for an image to match a part of his script where he said "My grandfather was in the Army in World War II." He typed in "army" and got dozens of current military images. I asked him a few questions about his grandfather. Fascinating story: born in Hong Kong, sold to an American, brought to the US, joined the US Army during WWII. I suggested he use one of the images that featured WWII era soldiers. I was eager to hop on a computer and tackle the challenge of finding an image of a Chinese American soldier from WWII. Later, when I entered "Chinese American soldier WWII" into Google Images I found several images.

Next time I help students with any project that relies on images to get across a particular point, I think I'll go thru a few image search exercises like the scenarios described earlier.

Google just added the Image Labeler tool that might be good practice for students. It looks like they're essentially getting the public to help tag all of their images.

Remember, integrating multimedia projects with your students requires you to think about what's developmentally appropriate to expect of your students. Most elementary and middle schools haven't even had much experience putting together a narrated slideshow. They've all been assigned Powerpoint projects, but haven't received specific instruction in how to make them successful. Try to give them frequent opportunities to interpret images from magazines, posters, websites and news papers. There's a fun drama game that kids love. Use a set of postcards with unique scenes, people, settings, and actions on them. Tell students to select an image and give it a caption, then they could take on the personality of one of the characters in the scene.

Story Bait

I see stories unfolding around me all the time. I'm intrigued most by the stories from those people whose voices are never encouraged or validated. How can a community really grow if it doesn't try to increase the volume and representation of its members? This is what I think must be one of our main priorities as educators working in school environments. Over the past the week at school, there were several big events that generated perhaps hundreds of stories. Unfortunately, these stories will probably never reach more than a few sets of eyes and ears. The photos from the International Fair, Habitat for Humanity trips and China Alive trips will sit on a few dozen computers, maybe they'll be uploaded to Flickr or  someone's Kodak photo-sharing site, a few will end up in the yearbook. How could a school capitalize on the media that's generated by its members? How could you use the photos, video and audio that's recorded to craft stories about the event to share with the larger school community?

Even before you try to pull stories out of people, there's a lot that can be done to facilitate crafting a story. Getting people to upload their photos to one site, such as Flickr or Picassa (to take advantage of the geo-tagging feature) and tagging them with a common tag like "2007 China Alive" would go far to document the collective experience of a big trip. Further along the scaffolding process, you could use the site tabblo and have people upload their photos to a 2007 China Alive group. The commenting feature in tabblo starts the conversations that could lead to a story. The jump from anecdote to story isn't that big of a leap, but answering the question "how did the experience change you?" is what makes a story more appealing than just rambling on about disconnected details. Stories do not all have to contain a profound revelation. As long as they add your voice to the mix in a meaningful way then you've enriched the community.

Master storyteller Jay O'Callahan calls them sparks. He asks people in his workshops to tell a two minute story about shoes or an accomplishment you're proud of or something very basic that nearly everyone has experienced. Sadly, we don't make room for these story sparks in most school programs. I think schools need "story bait" spread around their campuses. I worked on a project a few years ago where we put up neon orange Xs around our school's campus and downtown Atlanta that asked "You Are Here. Why?" The signs had a phone number and instructions to call and leave a story about why the person was at that particular place at that time. All of the stories were automatically accessible online and via their cell phones. I'd like to do something much more low tech for my school here. I'd take a few of the photos from the trips, enlarge them to poster size, post them in the halls and cafeteria with some "story bait" underneath the photos. Maybe a leading statement like "I learned something new about myself." The poster could tell them to call a web-based phone number that records 1 minute of audio. There could also be a website that allows them to enter their stories in text, audio or digital story.

I'll flesh this out this week. In traditional digital storytelling, you start with a story circle where the f2f contact with a group plays an important role in starting down the story path. This approach is different, but in this instance the context of the trip is set and that grounds the story. If I want to try other story bait ideas, overcoming the issue of context is central. The good thing about a school environment is that the school itself provides the basis for so many stories.