Hello All,
In creating a digital story, I wanted to introduce Capstone Projects. Every year, our program ends the year with a final project (this is just like ETEC590, which we will all have to do!). Many students struggle with the scope of the project and their role in designing a solution. I plan to use this digital story as a kick-off for a content module, and follow up the digital story with a discussion forum that is designed to elicit prior knowledge from students around what is required for a long term project to be successful.
Ultimately, this is a lesson in risk assessment, which is really hard for 17 year olds!
The story embedded here was made with Camtasia (offered freely earlier in this course). I chose to use a video format because of the strong reaction I have seen in students given access to short, high impact videos. Bates (2014) suggests that students learn better from words and images used together, especially when the story is conversational in tone. This video is a precursor for a discussion on Moodle, so I wanted to use a very direct story-based technique for bringing across the information. Using Youtube as a hosting platform improves accessibility. Using the video to stimulate discussion was based on the desire to encourage active learning (Chickering and Gamson, 1987) as well as student-to-student interaction (Anderson, 2004).
In terms of development, I used the recommended source 50ways pretty mercilessly. It had great suggestions about how to organize a digital story, including great suggestions for creative commons in multiple media formats. I also used StopMotion on the iPad to record a short doodle video. All told, the process was about 7 hours, owing to my newbie status with Camtasia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iRyM1ziVDg
Epilogue: We made a lot of changes to our capstone projects after that first year. We had a lot of ambitious and ridiculous ideas that failed utterly. It was poorly scaffolded, and we erred too far on the side of motivation on the basis of student choice and relevance. We discovered that students don’t instinctively do “literature reviews” (duh) and consider using Google to be tantamount to plagiarism. One hour of research would have shown the project to be impossible as proposed. On the plus side, they learned a ton, and Sean could describe to me exactly how they would have died and why.
References:
Anderson, T. (2004). Towards a theory of online learning. Theory and practice of online learning, 2, 109-119.
Bates, T. (2014). Choosing and using media in education: The SECTIONS model. In Teaching in digital age. Retrieved from https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/part/9-pedagogical-differences-between-media/
Chickering, A. W., & Gamson, Z. F. (1987). Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education. AAHE bulletin, 3, 7.
Mike