Two Apps for Digital Storytelling

I have been working with teachers at all grade levels the past three weeks to do more digital storytelling.  Some teachers are focusing on just narrated video slideshows instead of actual stories.  Either way, having a video at the end of a project is a great way for students and teachers to show off their best work.

We don't have classroom sets of iPads in our district, but several teachers have them and others have iPhones.  So I looked for a couple very simple apps that would allow teachers and students to quickly put together stories that at least have pictures and narration.  Here are the ones I have been using.  Both are for the iPhone, but they work well on the iPad.

Story Kit - I love how this one makes the stories in book form, with separate pages.  It makes it so easy to edit the story in parts, one page at a time.  If you mess up narration you only have to do the page over that you are on.  It also allows for text and some limited drawing.  The downside is that the final stories are best viewed as books just on the device.  You can upload them to a website, but there the book displays on a single webpage with all pages of the story visible at once.

Storyrobe - This app is my preferred one because it outputs to a video in the Camera Roll.  It breaks the process of making a story into three very simple steps.  First you gather pictures and these can be from the Camera Roll or you can take them through the app.  Next you "edit", which amounts to putting the pictures in order.  Finally, record your narration.  As you record (up to three minutes) you can bring up each picture as at the appropriate time in the narration.  There are no transitions or features that allow panning or zooming.  Again, I see this as pure simplicity and I love it for the students who can get distracted by advanced options.  The only downside is there's no way to redo just a part of the audio.  One mistake during recording and you have to do it all over...or just live with the mistake.  It also doesn't seem to save multiple stories, so consider this for projects where the story will be recorded in one sitting.

Game Design and Ecosystems - Project Overview

I have written plenty about the Game Design and Ecosystems project, but I wanted to have one post that links to everything and sums up the experience.

Andrea Thelen and I agreed that we accomplished a lot with this project.  It was the first time either of us had attempted such a degree of integration.  While I had worked with Gamestar Mechanic before this, I had never taken an entire class through the design process to a multi-level game.  We were happy with the results, but we felt it took a little longer than we'd hoped to complete it.  Also, the standard of the students' work at the end was not as high or as consistent as we would have liked.  The story we hoped they'd develop was not strong, for example, and some students didn't complete all aspects of the project.

I asked Andrea to make a list of things she'd do differently next time and I added a few items of my own.  Here's what we came up with.

• Assign groups rather than have students choose their own groups
• Limit group size to two students if at all possible
• Provide feedback on each stage of the project more quickly, especially on the story elements and the extra components such as the quiz and the playtest assignment
• Start the Quest at Gamestar Mechanic right at the beginning and be sure the students are progressing in a timely manner
• Provide more examples of good and bad aspects of game design

One goal of the project was to have younger students play the games and take quizzes to see how well they learned the ecosystem facts from the games.  This did not come together as well as I had hoped.  The younger students' teachers discovered they didn't have enough time to devote to the game and the quizzes.  One classroom did play the games and the students enjoyed them a lot, but only a very few students took the quizzes.  There wasn't enough interesting data collected from those for me to report.

In summary, here are the parts of the project that I wrote about previously.  Resources related to each stage are included in the posts:

• Introduction
• Getting Started
• Planning the Games
• More requirements for the Games
• Storyboards
• Final Assignments
• Sample Games

Donations are definitely accepted!
Our ecosystem project has been a popular stop for many educators searching for project ideas.  If you find anything here useful, please consider donating $1 to $3.  Any money I receive this way will be used in my district to purchase resources for similar technology projects. We and our students greatly appreciate your support!  We would love to hear how you use the resources too.

Critical Thinking Game for the Classroom

I know this game has been referred to throughout this blog, but I wanted to centralize some of the resources  for both high tech and no-tech variations are described below.

Years ago I made a game that I used in the classroom for lessons about goals and priorities.  If used properly,  it can be an excellent starting point for critical thinking and other higher level thinking skills in any subject area with any students from about age 10 and older.  

I have played it with many students from middle school through college (here is a video I made with some former students at one campus) over the years and I have come to respect the power of the question that it raises.  Whether it is used as a game or a classroom activity, participants are simply asked the question What matters most?  By carefully choosing the items and guiding the discussion, this can be a powerful catalyst for self-evaluation and problem solving.

Using the game without technology
The game I created can be purchased as a traditional (card based) party game.  This is the version I used most in class. I would use a select subset of the cards based on the purpose of the activity. From that, I’d randomly draw five cards and have students rank the items on the cards from most important to least important.  We would usually try to guess how another person in the room would rank them.

After such an introduction, students can play the game in groups of up to 8.  It works best when students can play in pairs.

The Inexpensive Option - Right now a friend of mine is selling the old edition of the complete game (called What's It To Ya?) for less than $4.  I no longer get royalties from that edition, so this announcement is not meant to pad my wallet!  If you want to pick up a few copies (5 copies would allow up to 40 students play), check it out on this page at Fair Play Games while it’s on sale. This is a bargain, believe me.

The Newer Edition - If you want the newer version, it’s probably easiest to find it here on Amazon.  The new publisher created a version that uses a board and score sheets.  It sells for around $20.


Here's a video overview created with the Videolicious app on an iPad.




Using the game with technology

I posted several free activities on Promethean Planet based on this game.  They work easily with Promethean’s ActivExpressions for ranking, but you can run the activity with any response system or the students can rank them on paper.  A free version of ActivInspire will allow you to display these without actually using their other products, so any computer and projector will be sufficient.

Here is the original, generic activity that allows students to draw random words for the original game.

Oh Really Flipchart Activity

And the versions below are targeted toward a specific subject area with pre-selected sets of words and questions in context.  By examining these as samples it will be obvious how you can adapt them to your needs even if these don’t fit perfectly.

Government
Family and Consumer Science
Vocations and GoalsDebate
Christian/Bible Studies


The version with the most downloads so far is this "Back to School" edition. It can be used as an ice breaker in the first days of school or of a particular class:

Back to School

And finally, here is a simple Google Presentation version that you could change to use the activity in any subject.  You can put the question of what matters most into context, such as What makes a good citizen? Then list items related to that. Or you can keep it general. See the above flipchart activities for ideas. (Even if you don't want to install the free version of ActivInspire to view them you can see a preview at the site that will be useful in adapting the free Google Presentation version to your needs.)  


And if anyone is interested in the history of the game, here is a video I created a few weeks ago about my experience with bringing a game idea into reality.

Game Design and Ecosystems - Sample Games

Here are two games that came out of this project.  There were other games worth mentioning, but I am using these two because the groups did the best job of finishing all parts of the project, including the quizzes.  The plan was to give the games and quizzes to some younger students to see if they would learn the content just by playing the games.  We are still waiting on that feedback, but for now, here are the games and quizzes.

The Rainforest Journey

Click here to see the quiz for the above game.

The Producer - Felix's Journey

Click here to see the quiz for the above game.

Game Design and Ecosystems - Final Assignments

We wrapped up the game design project last week.  I will post some reflections and post a couple games in the next few days, but for now, here are two assignments the students had to complete before their project was done.

Playtest Assignment - Each group was required to have another group play their game and record feedback on this sheet.

Quiz Assignment - Younger students will play the games that were made in our class and then they will take quizzes created by our students.  This assignment just lists the requirements of those quizzes.

MACUL 2012

This week I attended both days of the MACUL conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I have a lot of notes to sift through and a ton to ponder about the leadership topics that I encountered, but I also am supposed to be finishing the district technology plan this weekend. I shouldn't even be typing this short blog post at the moment!

I will just mention these two things:

• I started the convention in Jim Peterson's session on Creating a Culture of Learning.  I decided I didn't care about tech tools.  I wanted to hear about leadership and professional development.  Jim's talk was a good start and it is worth clicking through the presentation posted at the link.
• I was looking forward to Kevin Honeycutt's keynote presentation all week.  Somehow I missed it that he was speaking two hours after that as well.  So my entire conference experience for the day was spent in his sessions.  He is inspiring and that's what I needed.  Last year when I heard him, he had some repetition from session to session, but this year each one was mostly new.  If you are unfamiliar with his work, you absolutely must check out his site.  He's doing almost everything I hope to accomplish as an educator.

Because I only listened to Kevin on Friday I missed some interesting topics, at least based on the information in the conference booklet.  I will be going through the speaker handouts posted to the site this week to catch up on those and others.

Three Free iPad Apps for Flipping the Classroom or Just Teaching

I mentioned the strengths of teaching with video in my previous post.  More than just as a tool for teachers, though, many are finding the benefits of having students create video tutorials.  Here are three free apps worth checking out if you want to explore this on an iPad.  I am including just a few thoughts on each.

ShowMe -
There's only one "slide", so to do multiple slides you have to set up the screen, record, pause, clear and set up the next screen.  If you want to undo something you say, you're out of luck for the most part.  There's no way to undo just the audio.  It has a good community for sharing the lessons though.

Educreations -
I like how you can set up you slides ahead of time for presentations in this one, but like ShowMe, there's no way to just undo the audio.  I lost a 12 slide setup twice because of this and eventually decided it's not meant to be PowerPoint.  These can be shared online, but last I checked you shared only with users who signed up in your "school" community.  I didn't see a way to share with the world at large.

Screen Chomp -
This is by TechSmith, makers of Camtasia.  That's my screen capture software of choice, so I was really looking forward to using this app.  It has a fun look that should appeal to younger students.  There's also a way to share them online and you can scroll the screen too using two fingers.  The scrolling makes up for the fact that it doesn't do multiple slides.  The drawbacks are that you can only import one picture and one again, serious audio mistakes are going to require a complete do-over of the whole presentation.  As the TechSmith site states, this is going to be good for bite-sized lessons, sort of like Jing for the iPad.

Moving Technology Out of the Classroom - Thinking about flipped instruction

I attended a workshop last week on the flipped classroom model of instruction.  The basic idea of flipped instruction is that the students get the lesson at home, usually in the form of a video, and then they work on activities or assignments in class (instead of having them as homework).

It is getting a lot of attention lately.  In fact, in the four years that I have been doing this ed-tech job this is certainly the most promising trend I have seen.  My own experience with it has been limited, but very positive.  (I just used video for instruction and I wrote about it in this project.)

I think the strength of this teaching method stems from the fact that it allows both students and teachers to put the technology to use for what it does best.  For teachers, it takes the most inhuman part of the lesson, the lecture, out of the classroom.  I found while making the video lessons that I was becoming a better communicator.  I started to enjoy making lessons again.  I could present the material exactly as I wanted to in video tutorials without being distracted by things like individual questions or classroom management issues.  ("Ryan, are you listening?" or "Girls, can that wait until after I'm done?", etc.)

And almost all evidence I have seen personally and read about indicates that the students really enjoy learning from the videos.  Every student I have spoken with expressed how helpful it was to be able to watch parts of my lessons over until they understood it.  No longer did a struggling learner have to raise a hand and stop the lesson for the entire class if he or she missed a step in my solution to a math problem.  The videos don't have to be terribly exciting, just clear.  (Case in point - the man who is probably most famous for simple video lessons)

Of course, the materials that a teacher creates or points out in a lesson do not have to be limited to video.  Beyond just recording lessons, by delivering the instruction this way at home, a teacher can provide a wide range of tools that allow students to learn in the way that is best for them.  And maybe best of all for later success, students will find that they can learn many things without the teacher being right there to bail them out.

Technology is best when it makes things fit.  The pioneers of the flipped classroom model have found that it can be used this way to better fit the needs of learners.  The results are classrooms where learning is taking place.  And more importantly than technology doing its job, teachers can now work with individual students and can more effectively develop human relationships one on one with students in the classroom.  In the end, the technology will go to the sidelines and this will prove to be the real advantage.