Wicked Project Final Presentation

video

1- Introduction
My wicked project was on using digital storytelling to help support the writing process.
2- Problem
The problem was not only in my classroom but also throughout the whole school as seen through MEAP scores that students were lacking in the areas of ideas and organization in the writing process. They do not stick with idea throughout the writing piece and do not have a clear beginning, middle, and end.
3- Solution
My solution was to use digital storytelling to help slow down the whole writing process. Because of time constraints at the end of the year I choose to make a whole class digital story so the whole class would benefit form the explicit modeling and instruction of slowly going through the whole writing process of brainstorming, drafting, editing, revising, and publishing together. Since we finished out the year with a fantasy unit this was the genre I choose for writing. After receiving feedback from my peers I decided to collect data with a pre-assessment and a post assessment of students writing their own fantasy story before the intervention of digital story and after its use. I at the end compared these pre and post assessments.
4- Technology Pedagogical Knowledge
I decided upon digital storytelling because of research that supports its use in the writing process. I found numerous articles connecting the use technology to digital storytelling to supporting writing and found one by Ruth Sylvester, Wendy-lou Greenidge to be the most connected to my Wicked Project. Students use oral, written, and visual skills throughout the process of creating a digital story and this reaches out to multiple intelligences as an increased motivator. It also connects to the lives that students are living out of the classroom as they explore the Internet, video game, digital photography and making graphic organizers with technology. A peer suggested that I utilize a storyboard as the organizational tool for this project since students struggle with organization and I did so when moving from the step of drafting to publishing as we planned for the images and transitions to be integrated into it.
5-Technological Content Knowledge
Scaffolding during this process was a huge step in the implementation. Students had already had experiences typing and editing in Word. Also, they have used Power Point before and I selected a storyboard outline from the Internet that was similar to slide layouts on Power Point to help with consistency. Finally, I had previously scanned in images from students to then record their voices to using Voicethread so recording voices to a class book was not a new process but using iMovie for the digital story was a new layer of technology for the students. Students were aware that a copy of the finished product would be shared with families and adults at the school.
6-Pedagogical Content Knowledge
Knowing the areas that my students struggle with most allowed me to highlight these areas during my explicit teaching with digital storytelling. Knowing that students get off track with ideas I was able to keep probing them to reflect if their contribution made sense to the story as a whole. Also, using the graphic organizer I made for the beginning brainstorming of the story helped to plan students’ ideas out in a clear organization before even writing the story. Then using the storyboard to connect the images drawn to the story was another helpful tool sot eh whole class was on the same page.
7-Planned Implementation
As seen from this list, here was my implementation. All that I planned was able to be implemented. I was surprised with the amount of engagement from the project. Students really go invested into the story and characters. For the pre-assessment of writing I allowed the students to write any fantasy story but there could only be one element of fantasy so the story would not be too difficult to follow. Again for the post-assessment I had the same guideline and half of the class wrote a chapter two to go along with the story we wrote as a whole class. I even had students going home to write more chapters that were connected to our class story. The whole class brainstorming was overwhelming since there were so many ideas but once we decided upon the one idea each student had their chance to contribute a paragraph. As I typed their thoughts I wanted to have some reflection questions that helped the students stay on track. I made a poster board of these and students were able to look back at them also during their post-assessment. The questions were:
-Do the details connect to one another?
-Is there a beginning, middle, and end?
-Are all the details supporting the main idea?
-What is the heat (main idea) of your story?
-What is the one unrealistic part?
I choose to do this as a comment from one of my peers earlier and the consistent language seemed to be a supporting factor.
I knew going into the project that time was precious and that it would take longer than expected and sure enough it did. Storyboarding, scanning in the images and saving them and students recording their voices took longer than I had planned for. Surprisingly, my chatty students clamed up once it came time to record their voices so I had to redo some so they could speak with a louder voice.
The biggest bumps in the road were brainstorming for the story and scanning in the images and saving them all individually as jpegs. There were so many opinions with brainstorming and I would fix this next time by implementing digital storytelling with an individual or a small group so that it would be even more focused individualized instruction for the writing process. Since I am using digital storytelling as a writing intervention I would implement it in a smaller focused group so I could track the data more closely if the intervention truly helps. As for scanning in the images I plan to talk with the technology director at school if there is a setting on our scanner that can upload the images as jpegs instead of pdfs to save time.
It was delightful to see the students spending so much time on editing and revising which normally is a step that the students rush through. I feel that having them edit another paragraph that someone else wrote gave fresh eyes to catch mistakes and also having the knowledge that this project would be shared with many eyes gave extra motivation.
8- Indications of a successful project
My indicators of a successful project was that I was able to implement the whole thing, few technological difficulties, teamwork, students took time to using the planning sheet provided in their pre and post assessments, writing was longer and more focused in the post assessments, increased motivation, more time spent on editing and revising both the digital story and post assessments, and student pride in the final project.
9-Results
The whole project was able to get implemented as planned, taking a bit longer than expected.
The evidence of success was seen comparing the pre and post assessments. The students wrote longer, more time was taking on editing and revising, and students used the guided questions from the poster board as their own personal reflection if they were on track with ideas/organization.
My big "ah ha" after reading through all the writing samples that the use of Digital Storytelling helped my higher writers the most. My student that are at or below grade level continued to write with ideas that were not clear and stories that did not have a beginning, middle, and end. This shows me that they are not able to get what they need out of whole class lessons and more individual and small group instruction is needed. However, my higher writers did have a change in their writing after we created a whole class. Their endings were better and details fell more inline with their main idea.
This comes to how I would approach the project differently given what I have learned. I would try digital storytelling with a smaller group of middle writers. Again I would do a pre and post assessment but I would have them write in the personal narrative genre on a specific prompt since this is what is seen on the MEAP. Then I think in the small group setting of using my middle writers we would take one of the student's samples to create the digital story from, retracing our steps to how you should brainstorm, use a storyboard to plan out the writing, write, edit, revise and finally publish. This way all students would be getting instruction but they could at the same be using Digital Storytelling. After I would give the students the same writing prompt to compare their writing before and after the use of iMovie for a digital story and that way using the same prompt I would have clear evidence of growth. I think that time continues to be the biggest issue as if I were doing this with a small group the rest of the students would have to be independently engaged. I would do this whole project again but just in a smaller more focused group.
Lesson learned
1.) When scanning in files to then be uploaded into iMovie they need to be jpeg files and not pdf files. Each file was saved separately into iPhoto and then inputed into iMovie.
2.) There are tons of possible storyboards available on the Internet and you just need to find what works best for you whether that is printing it out and writing on it or editing it on the computer by typing into it.
3.) Input your images in iMovie first and don't worry about how long each are slotted to the playing time. Record each voice separately and then it shows how long that segment was so then you can click on the clock icon to match the time on the image to the time on the voice recording so they match up.
4.) Plan for more time that you originally think!
10- Why you should try digital storytelling in your classroom:
10. Opportunities for new graphic organizers to be used with storyboarding. They can be paper or computer based.
9. There are tons of resources available out there from storyboard to programs to making the digital stories.
8. Meets curriculum standards as students practice writing, reading, and oral presentation while integrating the full writing process from brainstorming all to way to publishing.
7. Research based practice.
6. Gives students more experiences to technology since this is the world they are growing up in.
5. Data collection can be used with digital storytelling to track increase writing skills.
4. You utilize what your students already know and scaffold from that.
3. It slows down the writing process allowing students to see the full process in action with direction instruction along the way.
2. Peers have opportunities to learn from each other and to rise up to be leaders in different steps in the whole process.
1. It’s fun and students have increased motivation.