Final Project Reflection

Being introduced to a new technology, namely Photo Story 3, I thought of retrying a project in EAP Math/Science (an ESL support class) that I had done last year using Movie Maker. The idea was to prepare students for a difficult text they would face in their mainstream Science class. They jigsawed the text by each making a digital story for a few sentences from the article and then watched the combined digital stories before embarking on a solo read. Using Movie Maker turned out to be overkill and more complicated than necessary. It was also too time-consuming to ask students to learn the technology and make a digital story for as much text as we gave them.

When introduced to Photo Story 3, I knew it was the simpler technology I was looking for. I also had the luxury of having more students this year and being able to divide the text into smaller segments. But I realized that the text was still too long, so I took it upon myself to make the example digital story from the first third of the article.



I also decided to try and apply my recent Zen-ization of Power Point slides to use as images in my digital story. This added an extra level of complexity, because instead of just importing images into Photo Story 3 and using the built-in text editor to add text, I made the Zen-ified slides and added text in Power Point, then exported each slide as an individual .jpeg image file. (Is there an easier way to do this?) Even though this was more complex, it meant I could design the slides to be more Zen than they might have been if I had designed them in Photo Story 3. I also used this opportunity to do two additional things. First, I was able to model giving credit to images from Flickr or anywhere else. And second, I made some screen casts to cover the various procedures involved in the technology. Here's one of those.



Making such a long digital story myself with carefully designed slides in Power Point and proper URL citations gave me a lot of perspective on what students would have to do. Over the course of two COETAIL class afternoon work sessions and one afternoon in a coffee shop, I think I logged about 6 hours of time making a nearly 4 minute digital story. The bulk of that time was actually spent making Power Point slides. Once I had the slides, importing them into Photo Story and recording my voice was a fairly quick. Photo Story was simple to figure out on my first time to use it. I ended up using almost 50 slides in the story, including some text-only slides. No kidding that making a presentation more Zen makes presenations longer. Unbelievable. But probably the most visually pleasing and helpful bunch of slides I've ever made. I'm not sure I would ever want to spend 6 hours again though. A shorter model would do the job just as well.

As for the students, the digital story making took 4 periods on average. Some students finished in 3, but others needed another period. Although the students needed one to two days to design their slides, I'd say the new-technology-learning-curve factor added an extra day or two as well. That included showing some students how to use Power Point and all students how to use Photo Story 3, and even some how to uplode their files to PantherNet, ISB's version of Moodle. Students learned or at least were exposed to a lot of technology. Most of them picked it up quickly. We had a major technology hurdle with the voice recordings and microphone settings. Even with some tech support, it was still a bit of a mystery as to when the voice would be recorded loud enough to be heard in the published digital story. About half the times it was and half the times it wasn't. Because we didn't have access to the same computers on different days, one day's settings would not carry over to the next.

When I saw the students' final stories, I was impressed by the students more Zen slides. Absent were the usual dull bullet lists of point after point after point. Images took the center stage. I was also impressed by some particularly creative students who drew their own digital images using some program like Paint to capture difficult concepts that they couldn't find photos or other images for. I'm not sure if I was blinded by the charming creativity of the young artists, but I'd be willing to bet that the students graphic interpretations of the concepts were better than using someone else's images. This is an interesting return to student art for concepts, but now in digital form. It hadn't even occurred to me that students could still make drawings on their computers.



Ultimately, using Photo Story 3 was better than Movie Maker. Much simpler. The ultimate product of the jigsaw activity could be compiled and viewed as a whole. A traditional jigsaw for the same length article would have been hard pressed to compile so many different parts for viewing in a whole. However, the technology element reduced the direct student interaction that characterizes traditional jigsaws. Students worked individually, although they could have worked in pairs. As a matter of fact, when a few students finished early, I put them in pairs to create a second digital story. In this case, the students interacted extensively. So the trade off doesn't necessarily justify replacing a traditional jigsaw with a digital one, but perhaps supplementing it. If students were "fluent" in the technology and didn't need to practice it independently, they could work in pairs and interact more in this manner. For the purposes of comparison, a traditional jigsaw would have taken about half the time, I'd estimate. Hopefully, the gap between the traditional and digital methods will decrease with time as the student become more and more proficient.