Throughout the last two inputs for Digital Technologies we have been working on animations and videos using apps such as iMovie and iStopMotion. These short clips were focussed on internet safety and had a strong link to literacy lessons, focussing on aspects such as story telling and digital literacy. We worked in groups to create our masterpieces, making sure that they worked alongside the curriculum for excellence outcomes as well as teaching young children about the importance of staying safe online. My partner, Jill, and I worked with the popular social media site of Facebook to create a profile for a young girl of the age of 8 years old. We filled in all of the possible spaces with personal information and posted details such as her friends, her pet, her school, her birthday, what age she was going to be and where and when her party was. The main point of our video was that our social media accounts are a map to us! We captured this through use of a pirate setting on iMovie and by relating the details of personal information, as well as the name of our imaginary girl, pirate related. We felt that this was a way for us to grab the attention of young people, by making it seem like an exciting movie trailer about pirates, when it was in fact teaching them a very important lesson about the dangers of posting personal information online. We were inspired by the Safer Internet Day resources which gave us an idea of the level of detail we should be going into with children of different ages and stages.
After we had all created our films, we had a premier (with popcorn might I add) watching our creations on the big screen. As a class of 20 adults we were all completely engaged and felt that this was a reward rather than a lesson. This brought to my attention that in fact, all learning should feel like this! Rather than a drag and a bore, rewriting stories which have been more or less given to us, listening to the “10 main rules of internet safety” and copying them into our jotters so that the teacher can tick the box, we should be focussing on lessons which will captivate learners. Digital technologies is a fantastic way to do this!
This kind of activity could be used very successfully with children in the classroom as a literacy lesson, beginning with picture storyboards for their ideas and working towards telling a story through film. Looking at literacy from a different angle can really help to engage some young people who would usually be frightened by the idea of literacy and find it boring as they “can’t do it”. This is supported by the statement made by Younie, S., Leask, M. and Burden, K. (eds.) (2014) in ‘Teaching and Learning with ICT in the Primary School’ p.14 : “Story telling can engage reluctant learners and those who might find story telling using their own drawings or handwriting challenging.” This kind of lesson using film and animation not only brings relatable and real-life like work to the classroom, it also makes learning seem almost like play, meaning that the pupils in the class are so distracted by their excitement that they in fact are unaware that they are learning at all.
References
Younie, S., Leask, M. and Burden, K. (eds.) (2014) Teaching and Learning with ICT in the Primary School. [Online] London: Routledge Taylor and Francis. p.14.
