The past few weeks I’ve been working with 5th grade students at our church to create digital stories which connect to our lesson themes. I have done this with students in the past, but this is the first time I’ve done a digital storytelling activity with students exclusively using mobile devices. It has been transformational for several reasons, and I am 100% sold on the value of mobile devices for creating and sharing media.
This project has been a four lesson sequence, including four different 45 minute meeting times. Several weeks ago I introduced students to the project, discussed different project types, and we created a rather messy in-class video together. After learning about StoryRobe (free for iOS devices) I put it on our 3 family iPhones and asked my co-teacher to load and bring it on his iPhone. This gave our class of about 12 students 4 iPhones (1st generation through the iPhone 4) with StoryRobe to work with. The last two weeks students planned, storyboarded (with varying degrees of detail) their projects, and used StoryRobe to create their stories. After creating them, I posted them to our class blog, and shared one today via email to a free Posterous website I connected to our class WordPress blog. Two of my favorite student examples are “Lilly and John” and “The Story of Jonah and the Whale.” Keep in mind this is the first time many of my students have ever created a video project and digital story like this. We are not creating LucasArts quality work (yet!) but we are having fun, learning together and having a lot of conversations around important issues.
Using StoryRobe on iOS devices has allowed me to bring FAR less equipment to class than I have previously in facilitating digital storytelling projects. I used the app “Air Sharing” to copy all the finished student videos wirelessly to my iPhone from my laptop. Armed with the iPhone composite video-out cable, I just needed a TV with video and audio inputs as my class display device. So much less equipment!
StoryRobe is another big reason this has been a transformational learning activity. Without it, there is no way five of our student groups could have finished their “production phase” of the project in one lesson. Again, all their projects aren’t exemplary, but they each represent important milestones of learning for each student.
StoryRobe for iOS:
Jonah and the Whale story
Read more about our process and lessons learned:
Sent from my iPhone