My digital story intends to provoke students in a two-fold way. I hope that students will be able to perspective take, an important part of being an historian. Secondly, I hope that my students will see how even though children of Mesopotamia lived thousands of years before them that they are similarities (and differences) between those ancient youths and themselves. I hope that they can appreciate that the more we see history as less foreign and far away from ourselves the easier it is to understand what life may have been like at that time. Hodges (2013) emphasizes the importance of historical perspective for children of this age group (12 -13-year-olds). She states that a historical perspective helps students to consolidate the information that they are taking in. Further, she states “bringing historical contexts into clearer focus can help individuals see the way they are positioned in relation to those contexts and also see that those positions, like the course of a river, may be constantly shifting” (p. 185).
With these objectives in mind, I set about creating a short story in Videoscribe. The video has three parts – the story, some provoking questions and then ‘the twist’. I hope that students will ask themselves many questions throughout the video. Even if the questions which they come up with are simply trying to figure out how the story fits into what they are studying or why this story is presented with this unit. It is a purposefully simple and vague story which is revealed as being a ‘true’ story recorded on a cuneiform clay tablet from Mesopotamia. But without this information being given at the beginning, the setting of the story could easily be anywhere at anytime.
I think that Videoscribe works well for the telling of this story. I was able to utilize the animation functions of the video creator, and both images and text are made more interesting with the transitions and visual effects. Videoscribe allowed me to set-up the story in such a way that I could tell the story without a specific setting while still making the plot obvious to the potential student audience. In this way, I was also able to take a primary source and transform it, through narrative into something that students would be more familiar with, by momentarily stripping the historical context and then putting in back in during the surprise twist at the end.
This story is created to begin the content module. It is trying to draw students ‘nearer’ to the history – having the students relate to the character in the story before telling them that it is a young Mesopotamian boy intends to make the content of the module seem less distant from their modern lives. Everhart and Harris (2002) speak of the strength of using primary sources and creative writing successfully in a middle school history classroom. Furthermore in their research, they note the trend of students to connect their historical understanding to their lives, when they state “the students tended to interpret the artifacts from the vantage point of their personal experiences and contemporary time frame” (p.53).
Overall, my experience creating my digital story as a starting point for my content module was highly successful. As I described on Connect in my video reflection, I had initially planned to use a website called Interlude Treehouse. I abandoned this website after trying to engage in video production for three days but realizing that learning to use the video creation tool was too cumbersome and time-consuming when I could instead go back to using something I was more familiar with.
References
Everhart, N., & Harris, F. J. (2002). Using Primary Sources and Creative Writing to Teach Middle School History. Knowledge Quest, 31(2), 52-54.
Hodges, G. C. (06/01/2013). Changing english: Reading within families: Taking a historical perspective University of London, Institute of Education. doi:10.1080/1358684X.2013.788292
Sumerian School Days [Text and Object]. (2016). Children and Youth in History. Retrieved 10 March 2016, from https://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/primary-sources/408