Technology Bytes

Over the last several months, my school district has been introducing faculty and staff to the concept of digital storytelling.  Several presentations have been given demonstrating different ways to incorporate digital stories into the classroom.  The response has been very encouraging with students and staff throughout the elementary, middle and high schools, beginning to explore this new way of telling stories.

This past Friday I was able to take a planning day with two of my colleagues in order to develop a Digital Fairy Tale project for their first grade classes. Traditionally, every year around this time we would begin work on what we refer to as the “White Book” project. (So named because the books the students write in are ….white. Pretty original isn’t it?)  Students would each write an original fairytale and draw illustrations in class.  They would then type their story in Microsoft Word.  What followed was usually a few LONG days of cutting and pasting the pictures and text into the aforementioned “white book”.  Parents were then invited in for “Authors Day” where each child would stand up in front of the class and read their story out loud to the audience.  While this has always been a fun project for us to complete, this year we have decided to take our fairy tales to the next level and make them digital. (Imagine the glue sticks we will be saving!!)

How, you may ask, are we going to manage to get 40 first graders to each write, illustrate and narrate a digital story?  With a good plan!  After sitting down and working out the process we will follow, I actually think it may be easier to complete our stories this way as opposed to “writing” them on paper. We will still have the children write their stories just as they did in the past. The next step will be to have them illustrate and write their stories in the computer lab using KidPix. We have already established that each story will be seven pages long, so this means each child will end up with seven KidPix “story pages”.  After they are all done we will export the pages as JPEG’s and import them into Photostory. (While it may sound like a lot of work, it should actually be relatively simple if we stay organized)  After each child has a story set up in Phototstory we will have them narrate directly into the computer and voila! a story is born.  Of course the great thing about Photostory is that we can easily add background music and transitions to make the story even better.  After all of the books are narrated, DVD’s will be made for each student which will include their story as well as those of their classmates.  Another idea we thought to include is an “About the Author” segment where the child gets to tell a little bit about themselves at the end of each story.

………Well that’s the plan and I really do think it will work out great when all is said and done.  We have even talked about expanding the idea next year to include recordings of the children reading all throughout the year so parents have a “record” of their child’s progress in first grade…… I can’t wait to get started!!

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