Context for Digital Story Telling Project
The digital storytelling project We Are Trapped has been developed to introduce students to a cross curricula unit, that focuses on the impact of bushfires on Australian environments and communities. The inspiration for this digital story came after viewing photographs of the devastating fires that affected NSW and Victoria in 2019-20, also known as the ‘Black Summer’ bushfires, and a frightening personal experience of being ‘trapped’ by bushfires that hit my school community in Port Stephens during the Black Summer.
The narrative within this digital story has been written to express the fear and unknown of natural disasters with how quickly conditions can change in the Australian environment. It will enhance lessons within a larger unit of work as a means to facilitate discussion around the topic of bushfires and allow students to make deeper connections to the lesson content. The content focuses on exploring the impacts bushfires have on the Australian people, places and environment through the use of emotive language and professional photography, to respond to themes within a text and recognising point of view through storytelling (ACARA, n.d.). Students will critically analyse and respond to the different techniques and literary devices used within the text, such as personification, similes and onomatopoeia to develop knowledge of vocabulary and literary devices in order to strengthen literacy development (NESA, 2021).
This digital story has been designed as a quality exemplar for students to engage purposefully and creatively with ICT, digital storytelling and the Australian Curriculum (AC) areas of English and Geography. Through utilising the ACARA general capabilities of English and Geography, flexible and analytical thinking, collaboration and the development of new expertise is created through cross curricula and integrated learning experiences – critical skills required for 21st century learners (Randall, 2019, p. 17).
Microsoft PowerPoint has been selected as the digital platform for this project as it provides many digital affordances and is a part of the Office 365 Suite and PowerPoint desktop app, which is available free to all DoE staff and students. Prior to reading the text, the reader (or presenter) is able to select and adjust volume of audio including the text narration and music. The literacy ability level of my students has been greatly considered, with many students in Stage 3 working below stage level expectations for reading and comprehension. In order to support this area of learning, I selected Microsoft PowerPoint as it additionally includes an extensive immersive reader function that highlights the word as it is spoken (digital annotation) and also allows users to change font size, style, spacing between words and background colour. This a particularly useful digital enhancement to increase text readability for students with low literacy levels and learning disabilities, such as dyslexia (Rello & Bigham, 2017, p. 72). Microsoft PowerPoint offers the user functional tools called ‘grammar options’, such as syllabic identification of each word and highlighting of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in the sentence; each identified with a different highlighted colour. These functions allow the reader to easily identify grammatical features within the text and is a valuable teaching and learning tool that contribute to the comprehension through deeper text processing (Ben-Yehudah & Eshet-Alkalai, 2018, p. 2).
My school has a wonderfully diverse cohort of students, with many students identifying English as an additional language/dialect (EAL/D). Microsoft PowerPoint allows opportunity for greater support of language diversity through the inclusion of a language translator, which will translate the text into over 50 dialects. Voice functionality tools allows the user to select a male or female voice over and the additional option to speed up or slow down the narration. These technological tools provide the ability to differentiate instruction according to students’ specific needs and abilities, allowing students to work more independently and acquire real-world skills (Stanford, et al., 2010, p. 7).
For this project, the copyright of audio and images has been critically considered in regards to the current limitations of copyrighted material, including images and audio, used within the classroom for educational purposes (Croft, 2021). While it is best to use copyright and royalty free images that are within the public domain to avoid litigation (Anchor Digital, 2020), I have selected images from a digital newspaper that permits the reproduction and display of material for personal and non-commercial use (Sydney Morning Herald, 2021). The music that has been selected for the purpose of this project is from Pixabay; a copyright and royalty free website allowing users to access, use and modify its content for free, without requiring attribution (Pixabay, n.d.). Audio narration of text throughout the digital story has been written and recorded personally by myself. The entirety of work has been licensed under a Creative Commons attribution that allows for the work to be shared for non-commercial purposes, allowing teaching staff to distribute and share this resource with colleagues, students and community members.
References
Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA]. (n.d). Curriculum connections: Dimensions. https://australiancurriculum.edu.au/resources/curriculum-connections/dimensions/?Id=46738&YearLevels=42684&searchTerm=bushfire#dimension-content
Anchor Digital. (2020, September 3). Copyright infringement in Australia. Anchor. https://anchordigital.com.au/copyright-infringement-in-australia/
Australia burns – in photos. (2020, January 11). Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/bushfires-hit-nsw-south-coast-20191231-h1kqd7.html
Ben-Yehudah, G., & Eshet-Alkalai, Y. (2018). The contribution of text-highlighting to comprehension: A comparison of print and digital reading. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 27(2), 153-178.
Croft, T. (2021). Module 6: Policy and practice [Online learning module]. Interact 2. https://interact2.csu.edu.au
NSW Education Standards Authority [NESA]. (2021). Stage 3 stage statements. English K-10 Syllabus (2012). https://educationstandards.nsw.edu.au/wps/portal/nesa/k-10/years/stage-3
Pixabay. (n.d.). Simplified Pixabay License. https://pixabay.com/service/license/
Randall, R. (2019, August 4). 21st century skills: Realising the potential of the Australian curriculum [Paper presentation]. Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) Conference 2019, Melbourne, Australia. 17-21. https://research.acer.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1349&context=research_conference
Rello, L., & Bigham, J. P. (2017, October 29- November 1). Good Background Colors for Readers: A Study of People with and without Dyslexia [Paper presentation]. International ACM SIGACCESS Conference 2017 (ASSETS ’17), Baltimore, USA, 72–80. https://doi.org/10.1145/3132525.3132546
Stanford, P., Crowe, A. W., & Flice, H. (2010). Differentiating with technology. Teaching Exceptional Children Plus, 6(4), 2-9.
Sydney Morning Herald. (2021). Terms of use. https://login.nine.com.au/terms?client_id=smh
Watts, E. M. (2019, November 11). Port Stephens schools and national parks closed due to catastrophic fire danger. Port Stephens Examiner.
https://www.portstephensexaminer.com.au/story/6484464/port-schools-national-parks-closed-due-to-catastrophic-fire-danger/