Digital Storytelling Proposal

Here is the link to my blendspace.



Problem of Practice:

After the implementation of a 1:1 iPad device model in my school system, students have become increasingly distracted in class. While many of my students are comfortable with technology, especially the iPad, many lack the digital literacy to engage digital media to its fullest extent.  To that end, the problem of practice to be addressed is this: By using the iPad, how can my students’ level of both digital literacy and engagement with the Modern United States History curriculum be increased?

Data and Analysis:

In anecdotal conversation with teachers at my school, many teachers express frustration with their students and the fact that the students use the iPad for social or gaming activities, while they become increasingly distracted to the content of the classroom.  I have noticed this in my own classroom as well.  Research supports this anecdotal observation.  As Hobbs and Jensen (2009) point out, students mainly use digital technology for entertainment.  Digital messaging, in the form of instant messaging (IM), text messaging, Twitter, or other forms of social media are also preferred uses of digital devices for current high school students. Levine, Waite and Bowman (2007) also demonstrated that student distractibility increases due to digital messaging.  This distractibility can have adverse effects on reading comprehension and other academic activities.

While some of my colleagues have simply stopped allowing students to use digital devices in class (either the iPad or the students’ smart phone), I have chosen to look at ways to increase student engagement with the content by embracing digital technology  .  The method I have chosen to increase student’s engagement with the curriculum is through digital storytelling. Many authors credit storytelling as a way to engage students with the curriculum.  Thordarson (2014) says “storytelling is central to moving people persuasively.”  Digital storytelling can increase engagement with the curriculum because it provides students “opportunities to talk about history (Fielding, 2005).”  Digital storytelling can also improve student motivation (Hung, Hwang & Huang, 2012).  Lastly, digital storytelling can build empathy in the student telling the story (Pandya & Pagdilao, 2015).  Through talking about their own personal history, students make connections with both the content and their own personal family story.

Digital storytelling not only allows students a way to engage with the curriculum, research also shows that it builds literacy skills (Eisner, Fleming & Kaffel, 2007).  These literacy skills can be traditional, reading related skills or they can be related to digital literacy.  Digital storytelling also builds digital literacy by supporting 21^st Century skills (Morgan, 2014).   

Building digital literacy in students in important, especially among students of lower socioeconomic backgrounds.  The more affluent a student’s family, the more likely they are to have developed digital literacy, regardless of their access to technology (Hobbs & Jensen, 2009).  The school I teach in is 41% minority.  Since minority students are less likely to have developed the digital skills necessary to be successful after high school, it is essential that digital literacy be increased in the classroom in any way possible.  This is one of the advantages of using digital storytelling in a history class.  Not only do students grow increasingly engaged with the content, they increase their digital literacy skills.

  

Abstract of Solution:

Like many high school history teachers, I like to tell stories. History is, in effect a story, both our nation’s story as a collective whole and our story as individuals.  I often tell stories from my family that directly relate to the Modern US History content. As students share their own families’ stories, I share them as well.  One of the ways that I propose to have students engage with the curriculum is through researching and then telling their own family story.

Storytelling is a basic way that humans communicate with one another.  Through stories, students learn about the group they belong to and its history.  They also learn to empathize with groups that are different than them.  Digital storytelling is generally defined as combining the traditional activity of storytelling with the digital media like audio, video, and pictures (Robin).  According to Palacios (2012), digital storytelling “incorporates some aspects of traditional storytelling.”  Digital storytelling is a way to continue the benefits of traditional storytelling, while appealing to the desires of digital natives to engage with the world through the use of digital media.  

             The challenge given to students will be to initially discover a family story.  In some cases, when talking to a parent, grandparent or other family member is impossible, students will be tasked with finding a family friend, community or church member, etc. and discussing one on of the friend’s stories.  The assignment the students will be given is not only to tell their family story in a digital format, but the students will also relate the story to United States history from roughly World War II until modern day.  These stories would all fall under the Alabama Course of Study: Social Studies (2010) Grade 11 standards. 

            Students will complete research on the parts of US history that their story relates to and include that in their story.  Students will turn in their story idea to the teacher electronically via a shared document and comments will be returned to them via the shared document.

            Students will also collaborate with one another via a shared document.  This collaboration will be a brainstorming activity sharing various technologies and methods that could be used to create a digital story. 

            After deciding on a topic and a method of making a movie, students will begin to work on their digital story.  Students will write a script version of the story.  They will then be allowed to use whatever form of digital media they like.  Being mindful of research that points out that students don’t have as much knowledge and experience with digital media as many teachers believe (Hobbs & Jensen, 2009) students will mentor one another in the use of digital technology.  The teacher will also have to mentor students as well, at least at the initial stages of the process (Warschauer, 2007) to reassure students and give confidence both to the mentor and the mentee.

            After students have produced the video, it will be loaded to YouTube.  A picture of the student and a QR code linked to the video will be placed outside the classroom.  Other students, teachers, administrators and community members will be able to scan the code and view the digital story.

            One purpose of this activity is to advance my use of technology in the classroom along the SAMR model.  The graph below illustrates how various activities of this activity fit on the SAMR model:

Level of SAMR	Activity
Substitution	Using Safari or Chrome to research the historical topic related to the story.
Augmentation	Using Google docs to collaborate both student to student and student to teacher.
Modification	The actual creation of the digital movie and then sharing and adding audio and other effects.
Redefinition	Posting the video to YouTube and allowing not just the school, but the world to see it and create a dialogue about personal stories.

Summary of Outcomes:

            Through the telling of their own families’ stories, it is hoped that students will increase their engagement with the content.  The goal is for the students to find the Modern US History content to be more relevant to their own lives.  This relevance will come from the connection made in their story. 

In addition to their increased engagement with the content, students will also increase their empathy with their classmates and other groups of people represented in diverse student body represented at our high school.  Students will increase their knowledge of history by researching particular time periods and events in history and relating them to their family story.

            In addition, students will increase their digital literacy through engaging different technologies to create a movie that tells their story.  This increase in digital literacy will be beneficial to them.  This will build lifelong and valuable skills, since students will have to perform similar tasks in the future, either in this class, in other classes, in college or in the workforce.

            At this time, the project is not fully complete, but I have observed that the first time students collaborated with one another via the Google doc they had fun deleting each other’s typing, and generally enjoyed the “cool” factor of the instant collaboration.  After a few minutes, they all settled down and began to complete the assignment.  It was really beneficial to remind them that the teacher was a member of each group and had the rights to bring up the various versions of the doc and see who had been on and off task.  Though increasing digital citizenship is not one of the stated goals of this project, this is certainly a teachable moment for that goal.

           

Works Cited

2010 Alabama Course of Study: Social Studies. (2012). Retrieved from Alabama Learning Exchange: http://alex.state.al.us/standardAll.php?ccode=US11&subject=SS2010&summary=3

Eisner, N., Fleming, N., & Kaffel, N. (2007, November 1). Research supports digital storytelling. Retrieved from Digital Storytelling: http://courseweb.lis.illinois.edu/~jevogel2/lis506/research.html

Fielding, J. (2005). Engaging students in learning history. Canadian Social Studies, 39(2).

Hobbs, R., & Jensen, A. (2009). The past, present and future of media literacy education. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 1-11.

Hung, Chun-Ming, Hwang, G.-J., & Huang, I. (2012, October). A project-based digital storytelling approach for improving students' learning motivation, problem-solving competence and learning achievement. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 12(4), 368-379.

Levine, L., Waite, B., & Bowman, L. (2007). Electronic media use, reading, and academic distractibility in college youth. CyberPsychology and Behavrior, 560-566.

Morgan, H. (2014). Using digital storytelling projects to help students improve in reading and writing. Reading Improvment, 51(1), 20-26.

Palacios, J. (2012). Traditional storytelling in the digital era. Fourth World Journal, 41-56.

Pandya, J., & Pagdilao, K. (2015). "It's Complicated": Children learning about other people's lives through a critical digital literacies project. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 38(1), 38-45.

Robin, B. (n.d.). The educational uses of digital storytelling. Retrieved from http://digitalliteracyintheclassroom.pbworks.com/f/Educ-Uses-DS.pdf

Thordarson, K. (2014, October). Education update: Road tested/ Engaging students through storytelling. Retrieved from ASCD: http://www.ascd.org/publications/newsletters/education-update/oct14/vol56/num10/Engaging-Students-Through-Story-Thinking.aspx

Warshauer, M. (2007, March 13). The paradoxical future of digital learning. Retrieved from Springer Link: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11519-007-0001-5/fulltext.html

A link to the video of my proposal is here.

The same video embedded into the blog:

Below is a storyboard for my prototype.  The idea is to have students relate to the curriculum of Modern United States History by investigating and telling a family story about the time period from World War II until now.

Students will use technology to tell their story, hopefully increasing their digital literacy.

Problem of practice

My problem of practice is 2 fold, one coming from the other.

Like many history teachers before me, I have often lectured to deliver content in my classroom.  I can honestly say that it has been successful for much of my teaching career.  I am at the very least, an engaging story teller and I have the ability to hold the attention of a classroom of teenagers.

At least, I could until my school system adapted a 1:1 device model (with iPads the last couple of years and Chromebooks starting next year.)  I struggle to hold their attention, even the best students are distracted by the things they can do on the iPad (text, tweet, play games, etc.)

I want my students to tell their own family stories, and I want them to use technology to do it.  I have found that thought they do know how to use technology to stay connected to one another, they lack a certain digital literacy, especially when it come to producing various types of digital media.

So, my problem is how to get my students more engaged in the Modern US History curriculum through telling their own family stories and how to increase the knowledge base of my students to be able to share a story using a variety of digital median.

Introduction

I didn't really share a lot about myself in my first post, and really didn't mean for that post to be my "introduction," so I'll officially introduce myself now.

I teach at Hoover High School in Hoover, Alabama.  Hoover is a suburb of Birmingham and is south of the city.  I live in another suburb a little farther south: Helena (which of course in Alabama is pronounced hell-E-na.)

I teach Modern United States History which is the 11th grade history class in our state curriculum.  This is one of my favorite classes to teach, since as the year goes on, it becomes more and more "real" to them.  For example, it's pretty cool to talk about the Civil Rights Movement with my class since they can go downtown and see the places so many of these events happened.  Our school is pretty diverse, ethnically and economically.  That makes class discussions about race and especially my state's history pretty interesting.

I also teach an elective called US History Through Film.  We watch movies and them discuss their historical accuracy.  We also talk about how when the movie was made colors the way the movie portrays the history.  For example, we are starting an "Iwo Jima" unit.  We will watch the John Wayne film The Sands of Iwo Jima and then the two Eastwood films Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.  We will compare and contrast them.  Honestly, I feel like I've won the lottery because I get paid to watch movies twice a day.

I've been married to my best friend, Rhonda, since 1997.  We have 2 children- Bowen (who is 10) and Emma (who will turn 5 in a few weeks)

Here we all are in Gulf Shores, Alabama last summer (and if you are a beach lover, you haven't seen a prettier beach than the ones in Alabama and the Florida panhandle.)  I'm honestly not a huge beach fan, but after this winter, I'm ready for the weather to get hot (we don't get "warm" in Alabama.  We go straight from cold to hot.)

I look forward to learning and growing with each of you.