8th August 2007

Digital Storytelling - How much time?

posted in digitalstorytelling |

In my morning workshop on Digital Storytelling Monday in Irving ISD, I shared the 10 minute video “Strive to Engage not Entrall” with teachers which I created on Sunday.

I then asked teachers to guess how much time it took to plan, produce, chop and publish this digital story - estimating with percentages the time that was required. The actual times and percentages were:

Steps
1-Plan - 120 minutes - 46%
2-Produce - 13 minutes - 5%
3-Chop - 70 minutes - 27%
4-Publish - 60 minutes - 23%

The teachers then worked in groups to answer the “so what” question? What are the implications of these statistics for digital storytelling in the classroom? These are some of the responses of teachers in the workshop, who emailed their answers to me:

  1. Be serious about the planning piece; all other steps will expand if plan piece is not sufficiently addressed.
  2. This information provides a model of how to effectively teach and implement the digital storytelling process.
  3. Students have to understand the objectives and the outcomes expected to be able to implement the plan. The fact that planning takes 45.6% of time means that we need to give the students the tools, time, risk taking to create the plan to be able to produce the plan.
  4. Most students want to produce immediately, so teacher has to ensure that the students can evaluate their plan’s objective in order to produce.
  5. Students have to be able to analyze their plan’s objective to evaluate what can be chopped.
  6. Publish is fine-tuning then sharing. This is the final product.
  7. More time is spent on higher level thinking activities.

On this day..

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 2:21 pm and is filed under digitalstorytelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

There are currently 5 responses to “Digital Storytelling - How much time?”

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  1. 1 On August 8th, 2007, Mathew said:

    In addition, in classrooms with limited technology resources (like one computer), it’s imperative that students plan out what they’re going to do on the computer before they get there.

  2. 2 On August 8th, 2007, Mathew said:

    P.S. For some reason, your movie file embedded in this entry crashes both Safari & Firefox. Not sure why.

  3. 3 On August 9th, 2007, Gary Stager said:

    Where did you get the idea that the prevailing goal of schooling is to enthrall students?

    Engaging students is only modestly better than ignoring them. Engagement can just mean that kids were tricked or coerced into doing what the teacher wants. In too many cases, the curricular objectives/content are so noxious that the only way to engage children is to sugarcoat the activity or dumb it down.

    I’m not sure what Papert’s distinction between literacy and letteracy have to do with your central thesis.

  4. 4 On August 9th, 2007, Wesley Fryer said:

    I got that idea about teachers in classrooms striving to “enthrall” students from my own experiences as a student and teacher, and my own studies about education and schools. When the teacher wants students to sit quietly, remain largely passive, and act as a sponge for information (receiving largely auditory input from lecture) I understand the teacher to be attempting to “enthrall” the student. When a person is enthralled, their entire attention is focused. This is what many teachers expect in a “traditional” school setting: The rapt, full attention of their students for the entire classperiod. My position on this is that as a goal, maintaining an “entralled” audience for 50 minutes or however long the classperiod may be is a daunting, if not impossible, challenge. Have you watched the video? I explain this in greater detail there. My central thesis is that we should ENGAGE students in meaningful work, rather than attempting to “enthrall” them with the prescribed lecture of the day. The link of that thesis to Papert’s distinction between literacy and letteracy is that we need to embrace the wider conception of literacy, offering students opportunities to consume, interact, experience and discover new ideas via various modalities - not just the auditory lecture of the teacher or the words of the textbook. I understand Papert to critique the traditional focus of schools on letteracy and a largely passive mode of learning: reading about the world instead of experiencing it. I agree with that position, if I am understanding it correctly, and am advocating that teachers seek to engage students not by “tricking” them or “sugarcoating” activities– not by being manipulative and coercive, but rather by providing differentiated choices for students for the tasks and learning activities in which they can engage during school. I agree with the idea that the curriculum itself can be a hurtful influence contributing to a coercive classroom culture, but I do not think teachers can be reasonably expected to entirely ignore such a curriculum entirely and keep their jobs. I do think, however, teachers in many contexts still have some autonomy in deciding how they will teach content and how they will invite students to engage with and process those ideas. I’m advocating for a teacher role which recognizes the futility of “entralling” students for very long, and instead opts to engage students through project-based learning activities and differentiated options for encountering ideas and working with them so learners “own them” to a greater degree and “make them their own.”

  5. 5 On August 9th, 2007, Gary Stager said:

    Hi Wes,

    Thanks for your response.

    I get your general sentiment. However…

    The problem with engagement is that it is still teacher-centered. WE need to engage THEM still reduces learning to a treatment model.

    The use of the term, enthrall, seemed unusual. It’s not used much (and was hard to conjugate)

    In your model, who decides on the activities available to the students? Does everyone still need to divide fractions? (for example)

    My problem with “differentiated instruction” (the brand) is that it allows kids to get on the train wherever they are, but they’re all heading to the same place and there will be penalties for passengers who get off sooner.

    I’m enroute to Europe. As soon as I get a chance I’ll respond more thoughtfully.