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Why is this story worth telling: what does it contribute to student learning? What’s your pedagogical rationale for doing this?
There are two main reasons for telling this story about Lesson Study using digital media.
Until you have experienced Lesson Study, it is difficult to picture the process and what can be accomplished. Many think it is finding the perfect lesson, others see it as professional development in student learning. Using the digital media tool, Animoto, I attempted to create a powerful visual/audio/textual story of my jouney through Lesson Study that inspires interest and offers a welcome relief from word-based communication.
It also allowed me to introduce a valuable digital media tool that could be used by collaborators in future course work. During the course, collaborators will need an accessible and easy to use tool for representing student learning that can display video of learning events and subsequent text analysis. By having collaborators produce and review video stories about learning and student interactions, they will become:
- Skilful at finding examples of best student learning
- Proficient at making connections and analyzing learning events
- Able to represent learning events and analysis in digital media for review by fellow collaborators
- Motivated by creating an authentic product for peer review
Why was this the right tool for you to use to tell your story? Explain how you purposefully selected your tool based on its functionality and your requirements.
The Bates and Poole’s (2003) SECTIONS model was used to select the web 2.0 tool that was used to tell this story. Using this framework, I reviewed over 40 story telling tools and decided on Animoto for the following reasons:
Students
Animoto is a valuable tool since it offers a variety of communication options, including video, audio, images and text. This allows the facilitator to accommodate various learning styles and provide instructional stories that focus on student preferences. In this age of web 2.0 tools, students of all ages are expecting more media in all of their educational environments. Most importantly, teachers/collaborators will need to become familiar with video and its production in order to participate in Lesson Study. One of the limitations of a free account in Animoto is the 30 second limit for videos…although remedied with a 5 dollar membership fee or a trial educator’s membership that I used.
Ease of Use
Since the story is hosted by a web 2.0 tool, Animoto, the learner and designer can easily access the tool and video stories on the web without downloading any software. User interfaces, for learners and designers, are intuitive and needed no formal instruction, simply click and go. Conveniently, design templates and uncopyrighted music, auto-credited in final story page, were included in the Animoto tool. In addition, Animoto’s reliability was demonstrated by the unbroken links to stories up to 4 years old and consistency and dependability of the program during creation of the video stories.
Cost
Although this tool is free, it would be useful to have an upgraded version of Animoto so video stories, longer than 30 seconds, could be created at a cost of 5 dollars/month. Animoto is extremely user friendly, making development time dependent on the complexity of the design more than the computer skills of the facilitator or collaborators.
Teaching and Learning
The Animoto web 2.0 tool story includes the following affordances:
- the ability to explain stories or events difficult to describe in words
- show connections between student behaviours and types of learning
- helps collaborators visualize a specific process within lesson study or student learning.
Interactivity
Of the 40+ tools that I reviewed, none appeared to provide any affordance beyond listening to, reading or viewing a premade story, not exactly Bates and Poole’s (2003) idea of interactivity.
However, my goal in creating this video story was not just to describe my journey, but to introduce Lesson Study collaborators to the affordances of Animoto for future projects in this course. Although Animoto is not interactive for the viewer, it does provide a tool for collaborators to visually and textually demonstrate to other collaborators their conclusions on student learning. By creating video stories, they can link visual displays of student learning with their text analysis of the learning process. Although, viewers can’t edit the video or interact with the video itself, they can archive the videos for future reference and analysis, an important affordance for Lesson Study. Video stories, containing audio, visual and text, provide a powerful tool for representing a learning environment which models complex learning interactions between all aspects of relationships between students, teacher, and content.
Organization
Animoto provides a visual and novel story of my journey in Lesson Study that evokes an emotional understanding difficult to create in text format. Regarding its future use by collaborators, Animoto provides collaborators with a welcome break from text based analysis and description of student learning models.
Speed
Because Animoto is a video story that once produced is unable to be edited, creating these stories can be time consuming if editing is required. It is therefore important to create a clear plan and story board before making the video.
Using the SECTIONS framework, I was able to select an instructional media that accommodates most of the key factors required to meet the educational needs of the collaborators within Lesson Study. I did briefly consider others but found that they did not offer the same variety of options or were less intuitive. JayCut, for instance, provided more options but was less intuitive.
What are the strengths of a storytelling approach? What are the limitations?
Animoto greatest strength is in it ability to inspire emotion using video, audio and text to create a powerful representation of events. I used this affordance to make Lesson Study come alive for viewers that have never participated in a Lesson Study group before this course. Another strength is its free web hosting and ease of use. This allows users to easily create cheap productions that can be accessed by anyone via a link.
Animoto’s greatest limitation is one shared with other storytelling tools, its inability to be interactive. This greatly limits the capability of learners to create an authentic learning experience that enables them to create individual or negotiated meaning. This does not mean that in the greater context of an educational plan, digital media cannot be a part of an interactive learning environment. As in my Lesson Study course, collaborators produce stories for peer review and discussion as a form of collaboration and corroboration of meaning.
Additional Reflections as per the assignment.
Why did you choose this particular tools?
The main reason that I used this tool was that it could provide an intuitive interface in which to create a video story with maximum impact. Secondly, it introduced my course collaborators to Animoto, a tool they could use to produce stories about student learning for peer review and collaboration within the course.
How did the tool impact the manner in which you told your story (perhaps in a way that is different had you just used text or related the story using your voice)?
Describing my journey of discovery in Lesson Study in text or voice limits my ability to invoke emotional responses in my audience, something more easily achieve with the help of music and images. Using Animoto, I hope to capture the audience`s full attention for 30 seconds and make them experience a part of my journey through the process of Lesson Study.
How might you use such tools in your own teaching to produce materials for students?
As a physics teacher, I could see producing review videos for each learning outcome, including images, short videos and text. Each 30 second video would demonstrate, illustrate or summarize a concept.
How might students be given access to the same authoring tools?
Using classroom laptops and free accounts in Animoto, students could produce their own 30 second review videos to share with their peers through email or online forums and blogs.
What kind of impact would you expect to see in your students in terms of motivation, creativity, or any other characteristics?
Referring to the exercise above, I would expect to see variable perspectives of events or topics, differing meanings, and varying aspects that they find important. I believe that the sharing of these review videos would help students in ways that I couldn’t. The 30 seconds would require them to really think about what they feel is most important. Regarding motivation, knowing that their videos would be reviewed and used by peers would likely motivate students to create an accurate and quality product. Creativity would also be enhanced as students tried to show off for each other, demonstrating all their cool tech skills and knowledge.
References:
Bates, A.W. & Poole, G. (2003). Chapter 4: a Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education: Foundations for Success. (pp. 77-105). San Francisco: Jossey Bass Publishers.