Digital Story Project for First Grade
For my digital story project, I have developed a culminating, end-of-year assessment that will bring together all of the skills my first graders have learned throughout the school year about writing stories. The project will be spread out over a few weeks and slowly build upon their skills as they complete each task. The project is centered on a short story from our Houghton-Mifflin series called "Amazing Animals." In groups, the students will select an animal and perform some simple research. Using thinking maps, they will draw pictures, write short sentences, and finally write a whole story about their animal. With my help, they will turn these stories into digital story presentations to present to the class and share with family and friends. For more specific information about the project and the various steps involved, please refer to my Curriculum Page I created on WikiSpaces.
Based on my students' technology and writing skill levels, I have decided that I will be heavily facilitating this process. As a whole class, we will walk through the curriculum page and resources provided. I will help the students edit/revise their stories. I will be the one to perform most of the technological tasks, as well. My team and I do not think our students would be able to do any of this on their own or at home, as most of them do not own computers. As such, my curriculum page does not include information or resources about the technology or digital media resources I used - I will provide that information below.
Ms. Tolman's Digital Story Example
I have created an example of a digital story to share with my students to give them an idea of what we will be creating. Since I am not an artistic or computer graphic expert, I used a photo book website, Mixbook.com, to create story book templates. You can upload pictures, edit the backgrounds, and add text boxes to suit your specific needs. Once I edited the templates, I simply Print Screened the image and copy/paste/crop/saved the image as a PNG file in Paint, which I would easily be able to import into a presentation software program.
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| Mixbook Screen Shot |
I used Windows Movie Maker (WMM) to edit my digital story presentation - I have used it before and feel comfortable with the program. I wanted to be able to easily add transitions and audio elements and I did not know how to do that on Prezi or SlideShare. I recorded the audio narration by simply using the Webcam feature on my laptop, saved the file, and imported it into WMM. I simply clicked and dragged my story pages into WMM, added the narration and music track (with some minor editing), added some transitions and BOOM! Digital story presentation complete. I was able to upload the movie file into YouTube and easily embedded it into my wiki.
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| Windows Movie Maker Screen Shot |
Here is the final product! It's quite short in length, but given that it is based on a first grade level story, I think :30 seconds to 1 minute is appropriate for this kind of project. What do *you* think about the length? Any other early elementary teachers have any thoughts about the tech skills of first graders? Any thoughts about the digital media resources I used? Has anyone actually incorporated a project like this into the classroom and if so, it is overly time consuming?
Any thoughts, suggestions, advice would be much appreciated!! Thank you!! :)
Any thoughts, suggestions, advice would be much appreciated!! Thank you!! :)
I love your digital storytelling project. I liked how you used different technology resources to create your project. I currently teach second grade but this is my first year teaching, so i have not used many technology devices in my classroom, since I started this week. I do know that many of my students are very low in reading and do not have computers so I didn’t make my digital storytelling project long. We are working on summarizing a story by adding the important details, so this will help students narrow down the important information they need for their presentation. I used Prezi only since it seems easy to use. I also will be providing students with each topic they should include in their community culture trunk.
ReplyDeleteI think the length of your project is great and It is a great way to assess students at the end of the year.
Thanks for the feedback! It was great hearing back from another early elem teacher. I'm glad to know you think the length and method of assessment are appropriate. :)
DeleteHello Kaitlyn
ReplyDeleteThis is a very cute digital story. Very appropriate for the primary grade levels. I am evaluating your story using the rubric in our book figure 7-14. The topic of the story is evident and presented in a clear manner. The information is appropriate and accurate. the information is presented in a logical order. It is visually appealing, self navigating and color scheme was appropriate. Creating this project with 1st grader will be time consuming but fun. The end result will be very satisfying and the students will learn a lot. You may want to ask for some parent volunteers to help create the stories.
I really appreciate that you used an actual rubric to evaluate my story and it sounds like I'm on track! I know it will be time consuming, so I'm hoping to do it either as a whole class or in four small groups, which shouldn't take *too* long. It only took me a couple hours to put the whole thing together once I developed all of the elements. I think having a parent volunteer or a media specialist helping out could be a good solution, too. :)
DeleteHi Kaitlyn,
ReplyDeleteWOW, your curriculum page is so great as is your sample digital story. I especially was impressed with the way you are scaffolding learning throughout and culminating with this project. Project-based assessment is always more rich and rewarding. Your sample is very dynamic and, provided with your instructions, gives a great example for students to emulate.
Sometimes I worry about providing too specific of an example as students can tend to mimic rather than express their creativity. One question I would ask you is how you plan to encourage students to demonstrate comprehension of your learning goals without just all giving you the same product.
I also noted you asked how techy you think first graders are and I think that is a valid question to raise. With the right guidance and with purposeful partnering I think you could be very successful. I would encourage you to keep building on this project with your students to keep developing literacy skills for your class. Maybe the whole class could write a book together, one chapter per group, for example.
Great job overall!
Thank you so much for the positive feedback! I also believe that project-based assessments are the way to go. I'm not *too* worried about providing a specific example, because as first graders, I think they need a solid structure when writing stories, and also, they will all be choosing different animals to write about. So, even though the general structure of the stories will be the same,the subject should be different. But, it's definitely something to consider!
DeleteHi Kaitlyn,
ReplyDeleteYour digital story is a wonderful example for 1st grade students. I also think the 3o second to 1 minute time frame is age appropriate. What will you do if you have some students who exceed the limit?
I also like that students will be writing about animals. Giving them a specific topic will certainly be helpful and allow them to draw on their experiences.
Great work!
Allison
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