Goal+1

Goal 1: to improve the quality of oral and written storytelling activities of younger students by integrating digital storytelling tools.
 * Middle... **
 * Goal 1 **

This goal has been very exciting but also rather like Pandora's box, full of surprises.There were so many parts to it, that despite having an action plan, for quite a while I was not sure really where to focus my attention.So I had to go back to the underlying questions posed by Robyler & Doering (2013, p. 26-27) and relate them to the needs of my students: 

How could I motivate and engage them to improve their storywriting? How could I support their learning needs with technology? How could the technology prepare them for future learning?

When I was first thinking about my main goal of using technology for storytelling, I had in mind to not only reduce the time consuming elements of writing but also to provide visuals, both familiar and unfamiliar that could be used to motivate the children's thinking. I wanted to help them develop richer oral stories and extend this new learning into their written work.

So I worked on a two pronged approach:

To improve the quality of their oral storytelling I decided to use a digital storytelling app to retell about their recycled shelters (refer TIP Model 1).  image taken from Robyler (2013. p26.)

To improve the quality of their written storytelling,I decided to use their monster art and the IWB to create stories. (see TIP model 2)

Since I have been using the IWB regularly already in my classroom, the main issues were to organise the photographs of each child's artwork and then do the individual recordings of the stories. I didn't know much about digital storytelling or what apps were available so I thought that I had best find out exactly what it was I needed to do.

Digital Storytelling <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%;">There seemed to be many different explanations or definitions to describe or define digital storytelling. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%;">Some of them include:

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%;">- a process that uses images and audio to tell stories (Roblyer 2013,) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%;">-an electronic presentation of storytelling on a specific topic.(Kobayashi, 2012) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%;">-a fusion of narrative and digital media content (Rebmann, 2012) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%;">-according to Bernajean Porter(2005) it takes the ancient art of oral storytelling and adds images, graphics, music and sound. It is usually a story about personal experience. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%;">I researched many apps, each of which was slightly different, so I applied a rubrics to help classify those most suitable.(refer Artifacts page). At present there is no criteria applied for use of apps in the school, other than teacher's trial and error. Research of alternate apps was in the end an academic exercise as I was only able to use the apps already loaded onto the iPad. This is a disadvantage of not being a leader or mentor of technology in the school as administrative access is permitted for the ICT coordinator only. New apps are only added at the end of each term, so my timing was not planned well. Sonic Pics fortunately, was an app I could use without the wifi access and was sufficient for my needs, otherwise I would have had to abandon the mobile technology altogether and rely on my IWB activities
 * [[image:PicMonkey Collage-digital storytelling.jpg width="600" height="600" align="center"]] ||

media type="custom" key="23989374" <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%;">However, before I even was able to commence my action plan, I had a major disappointment. The collaborative activities that I had planned fell in a heap when the participating colleague decided that it was going to be too difficult and time consuming for her to add it to her tasks. This meant that I had a major rethink about the learning steps needed to still integrate this technology with my children.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%;">As mentioned in one of my forum postings, another difficulty I had to overcome was the fact that although I had supposedly chosen an app that required no wifi, I discovered once I was within the app that wifi was needed to access the photos taken by the children previously. Fortunately, this was overcome in the end by the option of taking photos immediately from within the app itself and not from the camera roll. Also, the final parts of the activity were done one on one with help from my support staff, as the older children were not able to help out. In reflecting back on the process, it is interesting to note that many of my issues would have been solved had the school had a vision or whole school plan for the integration of technology. As it was, I think my results, although productive were a little piecemeal and I wonder if I would have persevered in other circumstances. I think this is an issue faced by many teachers, particularly those who find the technology confronting or new and are not as interested or enthusiastic as I am.