The Story Of Laika
The Moodle Unit that I have been building is on the Gr. 6 Earth and Space Science curriculum, specifically the unit on Extreme Environments. I wanted to create a digital story that tied in with this unit, had educational value, but that was not a lesson per se.
I decided on the story of Laika, the Russian dog that was launched on Sputnik 2 and become the first animal to orbit the earth. I thought that the story of this young animal would touch the hearts and minds of students and lead nicely to an ethical debate on the use of animals for scientific purposes. In this way, the story would address curricular goals by spark conversations among learners and perhaps inspire them to research the topic of ‘animal explorers’ further.
Once I had my story, I began searching for images that had the proper permissions. This proved to be a challenge. Even the image on the Wikipedia site on Laika seemed to have a copyright infringement issued. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Laika.jpg Retrieved March 17, 2014) This led me to conclude that a cartoon of some type would be the best option to tell the story of Laika. Using the story tools from 50+ Web Ways to Tell a Story wiki page, I experimented with various comic tools listed. I ruled out bubblr right away because I did not have images to upload. Kerpoof was promising at first glance, but I found the storyline choice very limited and it did not offer me the flexibility that I was looking for. ToonDoo’s features were too simple for the story I wanted to tell. Pixton offered enough flexibility of design to customize background and characters without being locked in to a theme. While more complex layouts were appealing, they required an additional fee to access. I chose a free option and began building my story. In addition to backgrounds and character choices, there was also the ability to change poses and expressions and move the textbox around, either attaching or detaching it to a character. I debated telling the story in the dog’s voice, but decided that a narration style to the images would offer a more scientific perspective.
I wanted to try my hand at an animation as well. Using the free version of GoAnimate, I was able to create a 30 second long video:
I enjoyed the feel of GoAnimate more than that of Pixton. The ability to add voice, whether recorder or text-to-voice, lent the story a greater emotion than could be conveyed in the cartoon.
Although an enjoyable experience, as a teacher creating material, I don’t feel that there is a significant return on investment of my time. The time it takes to produce a digital story like this does not reflect its educational benefits. On the other hand, it is a fun activity for students to do. Having students create content from their knowledge and research, then having inspired discussions is of greater educational value than simply consuming teacher created materials.
Resources:
Alan Levine. (2007). “50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story.” http://50ways.wikispaces.com/StoryTools Retrieve March 17th, 2014
Laika. (2014) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laika Retrieved March 18th, 2014
Media:
Photo of Laika’s postage stamp is in the public domain.
Laika, dog launched into space on stamp from Rumania Posta Romania , 1957, 1,20 Lei Michel stamp catalogue (East-Europe part 4) number: 1685