My Digital Story: The Snowshoe Hare Who Wore The Wrong Coat

I enjoyed the digital storytelling assignment, and look forward to sharing it with my Science 10 students. The process began with me deciding on a topic, which was the effect of climate change on the snowshoe hare and the lynx. I chose this topic because every year, there seems to be a provincial exam question about the lynx/hare predator/prey cycle, and the textbook does a relatively poor job explaining it. It is a concept that I need to discuss with my students and a digital story provides an interesting way to start the conversation.

After writing out the text for my story, I began to gather images by searching the Creative Commons, Flickr (using the advanced search for Creative Commons-licensed content), and Google Images (adjusting the usage rights to ‘labeled for noncommercial reuse’).

Once I had gathered all the content for my story, I explored the various storytelling tools that Alan Levine (2010) has on his 50 ways wikispaces site and watched his Dominoe videos to become more familiar with each tool. I spent some time trying a few out, particularly sites like Kerpoof, Mixbook, Glogster, and SimpleBooklet. The selection of tools was overwhelming, so I turned to Bates and Poole’s (2003) SECTIONS framework to help guide my decision.

S – Students: Grade ten students will be viewing my story, so I needed a tool that wasn’t too childlike or overly complex.

E – Ease of use and reliability: The tool needs to be easy for me to use, and simple for students to view.

C – Costs: The tool must be free.

T – Teaching and learning: The tool must be well suited for telling a story.

I – Interactivity: Students should be able to control the pace at which they read the story. Pictures and video will enhance the presentation and make it more engaging for viewers.

O – Organizational issues: There should not be any barriers to the successful use of this tool in my classroom.

N – Novelty: The technology needs to be relatively new.

S – Speed: The story must be loaded quickly so that students’ attention isn’t lost.

After analyzing a variety of tools according to SECTIONS (Bates & Poole, 2003), I chose to go with Prezi as my storytelling device. A drawback of Kerpoof is that you are restricted to choosing cartoon photos to illustrate your story, and you cannot add pictures of your own so it did not provide the interactivity that I desired. I liked Mixbook, but I have made many printed photo books in the past and wanted to try something with greater novelty. Glogster is an engaging presentation platform, but I find that it doesn’t guide the reader where to look first and I wanted a storytelling tool that provided an organized transition from one part of the story to the next. SimpleBooklet looked like a great tool for making a book where students could virtually turn the pages, but when I started creating, I found that there was advertising on every other page and I would have to pay to remove the ads. This led me to check out another tool, Prezi, which I have used in the past and found easy to use, visually appealing, and free of advertisements. One of Prezi’s newest templates is a newspaper theme, which suited my story perfectly.    

Prezi is the right tool for my story because it meets all of the criteria that I had set out in the SECTIONS framework (Bates & Poole, 2003). It is intuitive to use, and it provides an organized path for the reader from one slide to the next. It starts with an overview of the entire topic, allowing students to see the main headings then it zooms in to capture the detailed story. Another reason why I chose Prezi is because I view it as an established company that will be around for a long time. I worried that if I chose a less known tool, then my story may become inaccessible in a few years if the site winds up in the Island of Lost Tools. I value my time and wanted to increase the likelihood that I will be able to view and modify my digital story over several years.

The story of the Snowshoe Hare Who Wore the Wrong Coat teaches students about predator-prey interactions, and how a population change in one species can affect other species in the ecosystem. It also tells how humans impact ecology through the effects of climate change. Finally, it touches on the ability of organisms to adapt to their environment over time through the process of natural selection. As indicated in the story, evolutionary forces may not be fast enough to keep up with the speed of climate change.

Digital storytelling is something that I have little experience with as a math and science teacher, but now that I have taken the opportunity to try it, I foresee using it as an educational tool in the future. My next step would be to identify an area where students can create their own informative digital story. This hands-on approach would truly maximize the potential for learning because “most theories of learning suggest that for learning to be effective it needs to be active” (Bates & Poole, 2003, p. 98). With the vast quantity of online information available to my learners, partaking in remixing and reusing, or the ‘Mashup’ (Lamb, 2007) will provide my students with an opportunity to express themselves in new ways. As an educator, it’s exciting to imagine the dynamic storytelling that will take place.

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.

Lamb, B. (2007). Dr. Mashup; or, Why educators should learn to stop worrying and love the remix. EDUCAUSE Review, 42(4), 12-25. Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/dr-mashup-or-why-educators-should-learn-stop-worrying-and-love-remix

Levine, A. (2010). 50+ web ways to tell a story. Retrieved 18 March, 2014 from http://50ways.wikispaces.com/