Digital story telling has not ever been part of my teaching practice. I remember many assignments I’ve given over the years that involved students making a comic strip with pencil and paper. I’ve usually done one at the beginning of the year in science where each kid has a lab rule they have to depict in a comic strip format. I had no knowledge of any online sites and definitely no experience using an online format. I looked at Abbi’s blog and decided just to use the same site she had used (thanks for that). I see some merit in this story telling platform, students can be creative, have a chance to show off their knowledge as well as showing off a sense of humour (which often comes out in students comic strips). I would like to play around with this site a bit more and come up with a lesson where my students can do some digital story telling.
Steve, great comic! I love how you used Einstein as one of your characters. I agree that in a science and math classroom there is not as much room for digital storytelling. We are so constrained by time and the curricular objectives that we need to get through that it’s hard to make time for activities such as this. For social and LA though I can definitely see Pixton as a great site. I actually showed it to one of my colleagues and she’s going to get students to use it to make political cartoons that they will then use in source analysis questions.
🙂 Abbi
Hi Steve,
Well done! I like how you mentioned that humour can make communicating knowledge much more effective. I think sometimes we can forget that humour and fun can absolutely solidify engagement. I asked Abbi if it was easy making the graphics but as I can see, if you can do it, it must be very straight forward! All joking aside, the outcome of understanding static electricity is clearly defined in your comic.
Markku
Hi Steve,
I agree that digital storytelling isn’t as pervasive a fit in sciences as it might be in social studies or english, but I think the overarching technique is useful in developing multi-media communication.
A digital story could be a method for explaining a concept (like you’ve done above) or it could be a lab report. One example that I’ve seen used at Royal Roads (and which should be adaptable to secondary or older primary students) is the digital story as the deliverable from an environmental science course or module. This is specifically useful when the class or module is field-based.