Digital Images in the English Classroom

Enter Here – Digital Images in the English Classrooms

Sara Kajder

Students create a library of digital images to annotate their reading. It makes the reading more of their own, and shows meta-cognition.

During reading strategies –envisionments – the movie that goes on in the mind as a reader reads. It can start at static, single images and progress to digital storytelling.

Digital storytelling allows static images to become animated with video and added animation, and text. This teaching kids to use photos to tell a story. This can be a mode of teaching writing narrative. Elements of a digital story includes point of view, dramatic question, emotional content, voice,soundtrack, pacing, economy. To focus on the one topic, the students write the entire content on a 3x5 card, one side. Ms. Kajder uses Imovie from Apple.

Stages of a Developing a Digital Story

1. Pre-writing – may give a prompt “What was in the pockets of your coats?” or “Map out your neighborhood?” or “Map your childhood bedroom”
2. Artifact search – find things that will show the story. Two problems that showed up were either no artifacts of the family were available or parent not wanting to send in the artifact.
3. Storyboard development – a picture of each screen and a script of the spoken narrative
4. Script sharing circle – students share their script aloud with an adult available in each group. The discussion encourages revision. “If it were my story I would . . . “ This deflates the perception of attacking the person. There is the potential for some emotion discussion.
5. Script revision
6. Construction – 2 days, scanning, recording of script adding transitions. You MUST set some deadlines otherwise they will take much more time.
7. Screening, viewing, and discussion – a big event of popcorn and other adults involved in the educational process

From creating the digital movies, Ms.Kajder's students had a discussion about the different types of reading voices – the recitation voice and the conversation voice. While reading assigned text, the students created an image timeline of when the recitation/conversation voice happens in their reading. The images are posted, the reading aloud is one audio track, and the other track is a voiced think-aloud. The images represent the emotions, ideas, and scenes from the reading.

Google Print – Google is trying to work with libraries to digitize primary sources and books to be available to all K-12 schools. This will allow multiple kids reading multiple stories and represent their learning in different ways. Blogs – picture blogs

http://www.techsavvyenglish.com/– Sara Kajder's website Tech Savvy English