We're in the middle of my first big digital storytelling project that incorporate ocean surface currents. I chopped the project into bite-sized pieces based on what I read. Great advice.
It's been a blast. Imagine how delighted I am to hear two girls huddled over in the corner talking like rubber ducks while they explain how the Gulf Stream moved these ducks around the ocean. They had no idea how cute they were and delighted I was that they found a way to combine fun, science and digital storytelling.
First chunk. Teach how to find reputable sources. Talk about keyword searching. Identify the places where one might best find information....encyclopedia for ocean currents, Google for recent news articles, and SIRS database for background news stories. I also set them up for what they had to find....5 pics and 3 articles and 1 map.
Second chunk that lasts for two days. Research time in the library....they saved all their photos and articles into their network folder. We struggle to figure out how to best save webpages into their folder. (Here's where Diigo would have been super helpful if it only worked on our network).
Honestly, most of my 6th graders finished most of their information gathering. I think it helped that we did this as partners, though.
Third chunk was storyboarding. Hey it's really only a table with some headings. But I'm telling you this was the single most important piece to this project. It was all won or lost here. That's because I could pound into them, this assignment needed a beginning and end that described how the debris fell off the cargo ship and how it came to land on the beach where the story ends. It also helped me make sure that everyone had a map with enough information to tell the story of how the current carried them around the ocean.
We did not go to the computer lab to do this. I made sure no computers were around to distract them....so we stayed in our room and worked in the partners. This was another good choice....my partner took her class into the lab and they were sidetracked by the computers, looking at their articles and pics.
Fourth chunk. Start the just in time learning process on digital storytelling. With storyboards in hand, we went to the lab where they learned how to import their pics. Nothing more.
You'll laugh but one of the big issues was that kids had saved their pics in everything. Although they were told to save them as jpgs...they cut/pasted them into Word documents and PPTs. This, of course, means that they cannot import them. I was pretty bummed until I realized that it gave me a great chance to show them how to use Photoshop. I showed them how to take a ScreenPrint, put it in PS and resave it as a jpg. Using PS, inspired me to show them how to use the layers (heck, why not we were already there). They had a blast combining pics of waves and LEGOs riding the waves.
If they had extra time, I gave another just in time lesson on how to add titles.
Fifth chunk. Using those storyboards....I made sure that the storyboard had final scripts. Ready to use for their voiceovers. That meant another just in time training on how to do voiceovers. Here's where things broke down. Too many kids trying to record at the same time means that the background noise degrades the voice quality. I have to think about how to solve this problem....we have almost 60 kids trying to get things done in the same space and it is naturally loud.
Tomorrow will be the finish of voiceover and another lesson on rendering the final project. More about that later.
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