Stop Motion at its Finest (Guest Teacher Post)

One of the best parts of being a teacher is the collaboration that happens between students, teacher and even schools.  Today I am lucky enough to have a guest teacher (the first of many I hope) publish a post about the use of technology in her classroom.

Tamzin is a teacher of a prep classroom that has 28 students that are 5 and 6 years old.  One of Tamzin's goals for the second half of the year was to assist her students to use technology as a tool that facilitates learning rather than distracting/ detracting from their learning that takes place in her classroom.  So without further ado, this is Tamzin's story.

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I teach 28 amazing students.  One of the best things about teaching for me is the collaboration of students’ minds.  I love teaching the younger students because they are capable of almost anything.  They all have this perfect view of the world that is really special to be a part of.  As a teacher I believe technology is amazing and can facilitate rich learning experiences.  However as the year has gone on, my classroom has fallen victim to what I like to call "technology overload."  

I teach at a technology privileged school.  We have a 1:1 laptop program from years 4 to 7 and in my class alone I have the following devices:

• An interactive whiteboard with dual pens.

• A WiiA Sound field System.

• 2 pc computers.

• 3 iMac computers.

• 2 MacBook Laptops.

• 8 iPads.2 digital cameras.

• 2 video cameras with tripods. 

• A Tape/CD player.

These devices are great and always fun to play with.  However, my first job is to ensure that I immerse the students in my care in rich learning experiences and if this means that all of this technology sometimes needs to take a back seat then so be it.

This year I took on board the idea of Technology Fridays.  The idea of a collaboration day/time made by children for children really interested me.  Often in my class the best learning comes from the dialogue that happens between students; Technology Fridays seemed like the perfect opportunity to facilitate such dialogue.

After talking with Lachlan he helped me set small goals to improve the effectiveness of the learning that technology facilitates in my classroom.  I decided that having students realise that technology can help them collaborate, learn and share ideas would benefit them past the doors of my classroom.  I talked with my students and their ideas of the use of an iPad really shocked me.  For a 5/6 year of child, an iPad is a fun thing you can play games on.

I spent a great deal of time re-evaluating how iPads were used in my classroom.  Having 8 iPads was a privilege and not only that a way to show students that these devices can facilitate learning and fun at the same time.

Over the coming weeks I worked with my students to brainstorm our favourite iPad apps.  We looked at why we liked them, what characteristics we liked and what we didn't like.  We discussed why some students like some iPad apps and why some didn't.  The students even began to bring in screenshots of the work they were doing on their iPads at home.  Before we knew it, we had a wall in the classroom plastered with evidence of iPads in our life.  The best part? Parents even started asking to come to technology Fridays because of the discussions that were happening about how iPads can help us learn at school.

One of the tasks we were required to complete was a student retell of the creation story.  Before I had a chance, a group of students decided that it would be great if they could use iPads to retell the story.  Another amazing thing about teaching is seeing the fire of learning blazing in your students.  During the next Technology Friday we developed what we call "Stop Motion at its Finest."

The students had the idea that they would create a movie about the creation story.  We brainstormed how we could do this.  Some students wanted to animate their movie, others wanted to act.  Then one day one of the quietest girls in my class stood up and placed her picture on our iPad wall.  It was a screen capture of a stop motion movie her and her dad had made using an app called stop motion studio about her princess teddy bear.  The class fell silent as they looked at her picture.  This girl stood in front of the class and talked about how you take lots of photos using the iPad's camera and put them all together and they play as a movie.  She talked about how you can use anything at all and then you slowly move it.  The class listened in silence and when this girl was done they all turned to me and said "We're doing that!"

I immediately investigated the app and distributed to our class iPads.  I then used the rest of Technology Friday to explore the app.  I found that it is important for the students to be able to play with their technology before redefining their learning goals.  We came together as a class and discussed how to use the app and made a small video of the students in our class.  We came up with rules and cheats and discussed what we liked and didn't like about the app.  In the space of 1 and 1/2 hours we were experts on how to make a stop motion video on the iPad.

Stop Motion Studio for iPad
Easy to use, even a 5 year old could do it!

Before we began on our creation story, I immersed the students in a range of print and digital texts.  We explored age appropriate stop motion movies and picked out our favourite parts of each.  Immediately I began to see a definite style among the students.  They were making the learning their own and slowly the technology they were using was becoming invisible and the learning was driving their investigations.

I assisted students to break into groups and we began to storyboard our movies.  The students decided it would be best to work on a part of the movie and put it all together at the end.  Each group talked with each other and the class came up with 4 steps that would help them all complete their movies.

1. Work in small groups to storyboard their part of the movie.
2. Discuss what materials they would need to make their objects needed for the stop motion movie.
3. Work together to create their objects.
4. Collaborate with other groups to see if any objects could be used in other groups' movies to save time.

Students working together to create their storyboards
The learning was the students, they created it; they owned it!

Students then worked out the roles of their team members to assist them in filming their movie. E.g. director, speaker, the mover and the creator.  When they had created their objects, I allowed then to complete their movies with as little teacher instruction as possible.  I facilitated early discussions and encouraged them to work out their problems amongst their peers.  All in all, students loved the idea of being directors and were capable of solving any problems they were confronted with.  I believe the clear expectations we outlined in Technology Fridays prior to students creating their movies students to focus on their learning rather than the device and app.

Students were always given time to reflect with the entire class.  This allowed for the building of common understandings and the sharing of problems.  Students helped each other rather than running to the teacher for the teacher to solve their problems for them.  They discussed how to solve problems such as bad lighting, shadows on their work and blurry pictures.  Some of my boys even made a stand for the iPad so it would move when filming out of blocks.

Very quickly it became the students’ project, not mine.  They owned their learning and it was purposeful for them.  The focus was on them and not me. After they were finished we glued their posters together and hung them in the classroom.  I have added their work and the final movie below.

The finished student created posters
The students glued all the objects they made together to make posters of the creation story.

Do you believe it is important for students to own their learning?

How do you facilitate learning through technology in your classroom?

Feel free to leave me a comment, I would gladly answer any questions, you can even ask my students questions.  Sharing and collaborative learning is one of the best parts of being an educator and the learning should definitely not stop here.

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Digital Storytelling in Classrooms

Storytelling is such an important device that builds communication between other people.  As we advance further into the "digital age"  there are more opportunities for classrooms to build on and develop their storytelling skills through a diverse range of  Information Communication and Learning Technologies (ICLT's).

When using ICLT's in  the classroom, I believe they need to be seen as " invisible devices."  Just like the well used pencil and paper, ICLT's should not take away from the learning that is happening, rather, they should promote, challenge and refine the learning and the learner.  I also believe that age should not be a problem when it comes to using ICLT's as a tool for learning.

I teach prep (we're 4 1/2 to 5 years old, there are 26 of them and 1 of me; we are all capable learners). In our classroom, we have used a range of ICLT's to promote digital storytelling.  The class favourite is "Little Bird Tales."  Little Bird Tales is a free internet based program that allows students and teachers to create digital stories that replicate some structure as a real life book.

In the classroom, we explored a range of curriculum competencies that relate to the creating of texts for purpose and audiences.  Prior to using digital technology, we reviewed a diverse range of picture books and rated them on a class graph in terms of which book the class liked best.

We evaluated which parts of the books we liked best and why. For example there was a preference to books that were funny with pictures that were bright and colourful.  The children also liked books that had less text on each page but were long in length as opposed to books that were short in length and had large amounts of text on their pages.

In class we set out on an adventure to write our own picture books.  We storyboarded the events that were going to happen in our texts.  We investigated characters and their personalities, we became characters for hours on end; acting out our favourite stories.  We even explored if it was possible for characters in different books to meet each other and what they would say and do when they did.

After we each had a completed storyboard of our picture book I asked the students what we could do with them.  We talked about publishing our books.  We explored how real books are published and sent to shops so we could buy them.  It was only a matter of time until our discussions were on how some books can be downloaded and read on computers.  We decided that making books on computers was an excellent way of telling stories, because it was a lot easier for everyone to have access to our stories.

After long discussions, brainstorming, creation of word walls to develop our subject relevant vocabulary, we then set our eyes on exploring the similarities and differences between printed texts and digital texts.  We wanted to answer questions such as:

• Is storytelling the same on the computer as it is if we read a printed book?
• Is it easier to read a printed book or a book on a digital device?
• Which is better for the environment, printed books or digital books?

The classroom turned into a research laboratory.  I provided students the task to research how storytelling is different on digital devices and printed books.  The outcomes were fascinating students explored how to find digital books.  They asked questions like if we find books in the library at school, is there a digital library on the internet?  Can we download an app?  And my all time favourite, "Ask google, he knows."  

In the end, the results were about even.  My class had negotiated with each other that digital storytelling is lots of fun, some books have moving pictures, some have sound and some you can click on different things and you can find hidden items or characters.  However, what amazed me was most of the class realised that holding a book is very important to them. The told me that sometimes the characters voices weren't what they thought they would sound like.  Sometimes the picture moved and it was hard to try and read the text.  Sometimes there were loud sound that made you jump when all you wanted to do was read a nice quiet book.  

Suddenly, this small project was now a major focus in my students learning, technology had influenced their thinking and was assisting them to ask valid questions of what they were viewing.  They were evaluating the purpose of different texts.  They were giving different stories both digital and printed, ratings on their validity of being a good book.  All throughout this experience, the ICLT's used were invisible to them, they were a tool for learning not a tool  to be learned.  The students were the learners, I was their teacher and technology was the tool and that only changed when somehow I became the learner and they were the teacher.

After our research came to and end, we wanted to use our hand written storyboards and make them into digital books that were good digital books that we could share with everyone.  We had purpose to our learning and had objectives in our mind, that's where Little Bird Tales came to our aide.

As a class we explored the features of the website and looked at how the features assisted us in developing our digital stories.  We gave the website a rating of 4 stars out of 5 on its practicality and ease of use.  We decided that there were a lot of buttons and it would be best if we made a class chart to remind us what the buttons meant and what they did if we pressed on them.  You can find a copy of our final version  by clicking this link: Little Bird Tales Prompts.

Over the course of 3 weeks we slowly worked on our stories, my students made their own schedule of who did what and when they did it, who had access to the computers and for how long for.  We constantly discussed what we liked about the website, what was easy to do, what was hard, we even explored concepts of how we would make the website better if we were to make it.

Overall, the students don't really remember making their digital books as the best part of our investigations, they constantly talk about how they found out how books were made (both digital and printed), how they found out answers to their questions and how they made digital books that didn't have hard to read get or how their books didn't have silly loud noises or how their texts were made to share with others for free not for money.

As a teacher Little Bird Tales allowed my students to further the learning that was already happening in the classroom.  It fulfilled its purpose as a tool for learning,  it was never the teacher.   The tool itself is easy to use and best of all free! It allows students to add text, voice, images and drawings to the pages of the books.  It allows students to have ownership of their work and If you're really keen, you can create a teacher account and add each student to give them a personal log in code.  We did this and each student had their access details on a lanyard which we called our research passes.  And if you're really, really keen, you can print little QR codes that the students can scan on the computers webcam that takes them directly to their account.  This was "Very Cool" and simulated the feeling of being a real researcher to the students.

Since it's implementation in the classroom, we have used Little Bird tales countless times to tell a story, sometimes it is teacher initiated, other times, students feel they have a story to tell and they know that Little Bird Tales is a tool that helps them do that.  Below is the link to our first ever tale (click the duck to have a read).  The students each had jobs, some drew the pictures, other directed the voice recordings, others made sure that the appropriate buttons were being pressed and that most importantly the save button was pressed frequently.  My students didn't need my help to make this story, they made it themselves.  They are extremely proud of their work and I am proud them.  It is 100% student created.

• Click the duck to view our story.
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How are you promoting digital literacy in your classroom.  Do you believe ICLT should be invisible?  Comment below, maybe your insight can help the learning of another.

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