Tag Archives: digital storytelling

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Kindergarten Experts: A Tux Paint Instructional Video

Students gathered around the netbook to plan out what they would share on the screencast.

Students gathered around the netbook to plan out what they would share on the screencast.

I was so impressed by the work that Mrs. Kelly Hocking’s Kindergarten students did on their Tux Paint stories.  You can read more about that adventure here.  We wanted to continue their work in some way so that it might inspire and support other classes in trying Tux Paint.  After some planning, we decided to have the kids make an instructional video.  Mrs. Hocking brought her whole class to the library.  We talked about how instructional videos are a kind of informational text just like they are reading in their classrooms.  We also talked about being a leader and sharing expertise.  I made a screencast to show how to make an Animoto and we watched a part of that.

Along the way, I paused and had students talk about things that they noticed.  They shared things like

  • You clicked on things.
  • You talked about what you were clicking on.
  • You didn’t use a silly voice.  You used a serious voice.

We continued this pattern of watching and sharing for a few minutes.  Mrs. Hocking and I both added our own observations of what to include in an instructional video, too.  I told the students that they had to take themselves all the way back to the beginning and think about what they did first, second, third, etc.  Then they had to think about what they would say and what they would click.

Our Google doc captured what students would talk about on the screencast.

Our Google doc captured what students would talk about on the screencast.

A small group of 5 students stayed behind in the media center while Mrs. Hocking took the rest of the class back to Kindergarten to talk some more.  The small group and I took a netbook and started looking at Tux Paint.  I had them show me things they knew how to do.  As they did that, I started typing their words and expertise into a Google doc.  I also started pushing them to think about order.  What would someone do first? second? third?  I rearranged our doc to have a better sequence and put student names by each piece of tux paint that they would demo.  Then, we practiced.  Each student showed his/her knowledge of a certain aspect of Tux Paint.  Their tendency was to just click without talking.  I had them start again and say what they were doing as they clicked.  They also all wanted to talk while someone was clicking, so we had to discuss one person being allowed to speak without being interrupted.

On a separate day, the small group came back and we recorded their screencast using Screecast-o-matic.  In between each speaker, we paused the screencast and prepared the screen for the next student.  It was a challenge to stay quiet while someone was recording, but they did so much better after our practice in the 1st lesson.  Here’s what they created:

Our next step will be to send this video to Shannon Miller in Van Meter, Iowa so that her students can watch it and learn how to use Tux Paint.  Then, we will Skype with her students for them to ask follow-up questions about using Tux Paint.  The video will also be shared with teachers at our school so that they might consider using Tux Paint with their own classes.

I love the potential of this.  It is empowering for students to be able to share their expertise with the world, become leaders and teachers, and take time to reflect back on what they have actually learned about a particular technology tool.  I want to do more of this in the coming year, especially now that our students have access to Youtube.  Imagine the possibilities of students creating videos about what they have expertise in and sharing that with other students in the school.  The collaboration potential is mind-boggling!

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Storybird Round 3

Ms. Carney’s Kindergarten Class came today to write storybirds in small groups.  Ms. Carney, Ms. Samuel, and I each facilitated a group and a parent volunteer rotated among the groups to assist as needed.  This class followed a similar sequence of lessons that other Kindergarten classes had followed.  Please see previous storybird posts for those details.

Here are their final results:

Pratt & the Pirates

Fluffy Bunny & Her Best Friend Frank

The Little Boy Lost in Space

The Black Cat Finds Friends

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Google Forms: Choose Your Own Adventure

IMG_1645I had heard about how you could write a Choose Your Own Adventure story using a Google form, but I had not been brave enough to give it a try until this year.  The idea got placed back in front of me at one of our media specialist professional learning meetings by Tanya Hudson.   Then, I went into Google forms and gave it a try.  I made a very short, basic fiction story. I won’t go into detail in this post about how the story is made, but it is all about adding multiple page breaks in a form and then directing answers to go to those pages based on the response of the reader.

Mr. Plemmons’s very rough practice story!

Then, at our school level professional learning day in January, I did a session on using Google forms.  I shared some very basic uses of forms and also included this advanced idea.  Our 4th grade teachers were very interested in how this might be used by their students.  After some brainstorming, we decided on writing historical fiction choose your own adventure using some of the 4th grade standards.  In the library, I have several nonfiction choose your own adventure stories from Capstone Press, so these became mentor texts for the project.IMG_1644

The teachers gave me a small group  of students from each of their classrooms.  The reason we started with a small group was so that I could work with them in a smaller setting to explore the possibilities of creating this kind of story.  Then, these students could pair with other students in the class to show them the steps to making the stories.  The students worked with me during 5 hour-long sessions.

In session 1, we read some excerpts from the informational Capstone Press books.  Then, I walked them through the story I made and how it was created.  They ended this session by “messing around” in Google forms to practice some of the things I modeled.

In session 2, students looked at the standards and chose their topics to begin researching.  They chose from:

  • Describe colonial life in America as experienced by various people, including large landowners, farmers, artisans, women, indentured servants, slaves, and Native Americans.
  • Locate where Native Americans settled with emphasis on the Arctic (Inuit), Northwest (Kwakiutl), Plateau (Nez Perce), Southwest (Hopi), Plains (Pawnee), and Southeast (Seminole).
  • Describe the reasons for, obstacles to, and accomplishments of the Spanish, French, and English explorations of John Cabot, Vasco Núñez de Balboa, Juan Ponce de León, Christopher Columbus, Henry Hudson, and Jacques Cartier.
  • Trace the events that shaped the revolutionary movement in America, including the French and Indian War, British Imperial Policy that led to the 1765 Stamp Act, the slogan “no taxation without representation,” the activities of the Sons of Liberty, and the Boston Tea Party.
  • Describe the major events of the American Revolution and explain the factors leading to American victory and British defeat; include the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Saratoga, and Yorktown.
  • Describe key individuals in the American Revolution with emphasis on King George III, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Benedict Arnold, Patrick Henry, and John Adams.

IMG_1643In all of the other sessions, students mixed research from books, websites, ebooks, and the research tool in Google Docs with actually creating their form.  Students supported one another as they figured out things, but students also conferenced with me on their stories.  About mid-way through their sessions, I had students go ahead and submit the link to their form to me.  I used a Google form to gather all of their links.  Then, I could easily check-in on students without disturbing their writing.

As I look back at what we’ve done so far, it has been a very messy process with lots of different kinds of learning going on simultaneously.  If I had it to do again, I think it would be easier to start with a fiction story than weaving in history.  Just making the structure of the Google form and getting it to work took a lot of time and students were also trying to research facts.  When they moved to research, their skills at creating their forms were getting a little rusty.  I think if students started with fiction where they could just make everything up, they could spend more time being creative and actually getting the form to work.  We learned a lot about the process, and I definitely think that these students will be able to show others the steps it would take to create their own.

All of their stories are still works in progress, but you can try them out here:

JP’s Boston Massacre

Henry’s Seige of Yorktown

Dmitri’s French and Indian War

Lucy’s Colonial Times

Jake’s Taxes of the British

Will’s Battle of Lexington and Concord

Lilli’s Battle of Lexington and Concord

Hadley’s Boston Tea Party

Graham’s French and Indian War

Anna’s Native American Tribes

Samantha’s Boston Tea Party

Feel free to leave feedback on any of the stories as a comment and I’ll pass it along to the students to celebrate and improve their stories.

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More Kindergarten Storybirds

These cards were used prior to moving into Storybird.

These cards were used prior to moving into Storybird.

You may remember from earlier in the year that Ms. Hocking’s Kindergarten class worked on a sequence of lessons in the library and in their classroom to eventually produce their own story inspired by art using Storybird.  Now, even more of the Kindergarten classes are working on a similar sequence of lessons.  We have spent time on the common core standard:

ELACCKRL7:  With prompting and support, describe the relationship between illustrations and the story in which they appear (e.g., what moment in a story an illustration depicts).

This has been done through wordless picture books, picture books where part of the story is told in text and part in pictures, and picture books where the pictures support the text.  Students read these books in class lessons as well as in the library.

To prepare for Storybird, we started by using storytelling cards from a set of cards called “Tell Me a Story“.  I chose a sequence of cards and then had the kids begin telling the story and linking the story from one card to another.  As we transitioned to Storybird, I told them that it was like pulling illustrations from a big deck of cards and figuring out how the story connected together across cards.  We wrote a Storybird together as a class to model the thinking it takes to select a sequence of pictures as well as create text that ties together the pictures.

Finally, in small groups with an adult, students wrote their own storybird. The role of the adult was to lower the barriers to artistic expression by helping students with things like typing, taking turns, etc.   Today, Ms. Seeling’s class (Mrs. Boyle’s Class), created their stories in small groups.  We had 5 groups led by me, Ms. Seeling, the parapro, a student teacher, and a parent volunteer.  Here are their final stories:

They Are Friends

The Rabbit and His Friends

A Porcupine Babysitter

The Mean Gorilla

The Porcupine Dream

Ms. Seeling also hopes to have some students make individual stories and then use Screencast-o-matic to record the students reading their stories.  I love how each teacher and class is learning from what previous classes did and building onto what was accomplished.

 

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Storybird with Kindergarten

Mrs. Kelly Hocking’s Kindergarten class has been hard at work collaborating with me in the media center on writing stories from art.  This idea was initiated in their classroom, and Mrs. Hocking asked me how I might support their class in doing this exploration using some kind of technology.

To start, I showed the class Storybird very briefly.  Storybird offers collections of artwork that inspire stories.  You select images from a collection and add your story.  Then, you publish your digital book to the web.

We spent the remainder of the first session looking at a wordless picture book under the document camera.  We used Andy Runton’s Owly and Wormy: Friends All Aflutter.  On each page, we asked ourselves who is in the picture?, where are they?, and what are they doing?  We split into 4 groups to look at even more wordless books in a smaller setting.  The classroom teacher, paraprofessional, special education teacher, and EIP teacher all supported a group.  I rotated between all 4 groups and took over groups if the teacher needed to give a particular student more support.

A couple of weeks went by where the students continued to use wordless books in their classroom to practice telling stories from art.  When they returned to the media center, I did a whole group modeling of how to use Storybird.  We looked at features like how to add a page, how to drag and drop a picture, and where to type the words.  We also talked about putting together a story and how you have to think carefully about which picture makes the most sense to come next in the story.  Finally, we talked about how to go back and re-read your story and make changes if needed.

The final lesson was back in small groups in the media center.  Each group had the same adult leaders and a laptop logged into storybird.  Each group had a different account.  The adult facilitated each group in creating their own storybird, but the students were expected to interact with the technology and construct the story.  The adult did most of the typing while the students selected pictures, typed limited text, and added pages.  Even in small groups, it was a challenge to maintain focus, but each group completed their story in our 45 minute time block.

These students are the only students in the school to have used Storybird, so they are now available to show other students and teachers in the school how it works.  I look forward to trying this again with many more classes.

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Read their Storybirds here:

Dragon Bat Girl Attacks Creepy Girl

Super Lightening Boy Saves the Day

The Party

The Happy Fairy and the Five Birds

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Digital Alphabet Books

 

 

Two Kindergarten classes have been collaborating with me in the library to support their study of the alphabet.  First students came to the library for a lesson on alphabet books.  We explored numerous alphabet books, upper/lowercase letters, and the sounds letters make.  I used LMNO Peas by Keith Baker to look specifically at upper/lowercase letters.  Next, we used Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal Alphabet by David McLimans to continue looking at upper and lowercase letters, but in an animal format.  We put each illustration under the document camera, guessed what letter the animal was making, looked at the standard upper/lowercase letter, and talked about how the animal’s name started with the letter.  We ended with Alphabet Explosion: Search and Count from Alien to Zebra by John Nickle.  We put a few illustrations under the document camera and had students identify as many things as they could find that started with the letter of the alphabet represented on the page.  At the close, students checked out an alphabet book from our wide selection.

In class, students were each assigned a letter of the alphabet.  They decorated an uppercase & lowercase letter, added an illustration that represented that letter, and wrote the word for the illustration.  They also began practicing saying the letter, the sound it makes, and the word for their illustration.  In small groups, they brought their finished illustrations to the library to use the scanner to scan their images.  While students waited to scan, they continued practicing their scripts.  After 2 days of scanning, I imported all of their pictures into Photo Story.  Then, in small groups they came back to record their scripts for their assigned letter(s).  Once again, while students waited, they practiced.  After all students recorded their voices, I finalized the Photo Story and uploaded it to Youtube.  The students will come back to the library the next time they check out books for a premiere of their video, but you can get a sneak peek of one class below.