Digital storytelling in the classroom.

This session was given by the CEO and founder of 'Storyboard That' Aaron Sherman. He started off by giving us a little of his background which is not what we would expect. his background is in commerce and business.

He also gave us the names of two additional websites which he started

quickrubric.com and photosforclass.com

which are both fantastic resources for teachers and well worth investigating. (I have already used photosforclass to find photos for my course.)

He pointed out that storyboards are highly flexible graphic organisers which can be adapted to any lesson, it makes learning fun and his site makes producing them really easy. His team includes not only technical people but also teachers who have a direct feed into the team.

Aaron showed us a typical goals and objectives list for a lesson and then different forms of writing formats for class. Then he showed us how StoryboardThat meets these objectives by using storyboards. They bring the topic to life and engage the students. He then showed us a video of how to use StoryboardThat which I include here as it was not visible to all participants





This seems a very simple product to use which is a definite advantage to teachers and students as the storyboard can be produced rapidly so that the focus can be on the language/topic.

Following on he went on to show us that it can be produced as a live slideshow, as pdfs and many printing options which is a definite advantage. The default security settings  are high to protect student identity.

He talked about ways of teaching vocabulary by visually presenting meanings, how to follow characters in a story and what types of character they are. By students producing their own storyboard they can develop and show their knowledge attainment.

He then went on to show us the different type of storyboard, I liked the idea of the timeline as it could be used to show similarities between tenses and conditionals, the only problem for me is that this is in the paid section but you can just register for a month at a time when you need it so it is really flexible and not too expensive.

He then went on to show us the uses of StoryboardThat in order to teach maths, science, history  and foreign language teaching, He told us that for the paid version of StoryboardThat you can automatically import photos from his photosforclass website which are automatically cited. This is obviously a great boon to educators.

He then went on to show us the admin side of the site which enables the teacher to monitor student activity. This has been produced after consultation with teachers. He finished off by advising us of the pricing structure.

This looks like a very comprehensive and valuable tool for teachers, it can initially engage students in topics and then continue the engagement by allowing them to produce their own storyboards using their own ideas and language. The expression 'learning by the backdoor' was used and it seems very appropriate for this context as students do not realise how much they are learning when they produce their own storyboards. Another really useful webinar!