Overview
The only digital story that has been done in our school that I am aware, of is the class “choose you adventure” book that my class wrote last year. However, it was more them telling me what they wanted and me typing it in. I want the students to take more command of it.
Keeping in mind that this is new for me and the students, I decided to start small and look for ideas from others. I looked through some resources and am drawn to The ABC’s of sunshine Lesson on DigitalWish.com.
In this lesson, students are assigned letters of the alphabet and they have to take photos of objects that start with that letter. The photos are then uploaded and printed. The pictures are sorted and the students decide which ones to use.
The pictures are then put together in a storyboard and students create the captions for each page. The book is put together as a paper copy and shared.
I would stick to this plan for this year, but I have a vision to evolve this into a digital book where students could add narration. I already have a book creator account and believe this would be feasible. Something I like about this is that I always do a photography lesson with the kids and this ties into that nicely and allows me to tie it into our curriculum and justify doing it!
Find delight: The visual and text connections for the students, and when they merge in the digital format. I think it will be really fun for them to not only narrate, but take on character voices in moments of dialogue. Also, delight that you teach photography to kindergarten.
Questions: In the lesson there was an emphasis on the school community. Would you do that with yours? Or will yours take a more personal narrative or fictional narrative focus? Also, which platform do you have a book creator account on? I’d love to see if it’s one I can use.
Connection to post-pandemic vision: I think the lesson connects well with the playful vision you wrote about while incorporating a form of digital output.
Creativity/Thoughts/Suggestions: Especially for the younger ages, I worry about completely evolving away from the paper copy books that students created. I think digital can be powerful, but it also doesn’t hold the same sense memory as a tangible object in hand. My college-age kids still have books they created in 1st and 2nd grade. Truthfully, I do, too:) Is there a way to keep the tangible and also extend to the digital?
I like the idea of creating both a paper copy and evolving it into a digital copy as well. Which is something that could be worked on even after the paper copy is complete. This year I will stick to a paper copy because of time restraints.
As far as community, I am not opposed to having students explore the building to find objects, it is just frowned upon to have students in the halls. That was the only reason I limited it to the classroom. I also think it would be fantastic if they took pictures outside of school (the AK railroad, or other Alaska local specific artifacts), I just don’t think many parents would help their children with it based on the demographic and the involvement of the parents at present.
The program I have is book creator (https://bookcreator.com/). It was first brought to my attention at ASTE, but I haven’t played with it much yet. We made a simple group book, it was very simple and easy to navigate.
I really liked the original idea. However, I really appreciated the ease in which you seem to be expanding on how to improve upon it and I think it would be fantastic to add narration. It would be interesting if you kept this in a digital format and had them work on this project in the beginning of the school year and then also add further narration at the end as some sort of ‘accumulating project.’ It could be fun and cute to see how far their vocabulary has grown from the beginning!
Oh I love Bethany’s idea that you might repeat a project like this, or make it an “accumulating project.” This connects for me with Deni’s mention “sense memory” in tangible projects. These could become very special books for your kids especially if they work on them together over time.
The curriculum you linked to focuses on fairytale. Would you also ask students to focus on this genre? What other options are you imagining?
Thinking about your post on the future you’re envisioning, I wonder if there is opportunity here to bridge school and home. You mentioned in a comment above that you don’t think parents would help with taking pictures at home. Could students bring in objects from home? Or?
here is the correct link….I had multiple open when I was looking at stuff and must have copied the wrong one:(
https://www.digitalwish.com/dw/digitalwish/view_lesson_plans?id=3176