Case Study: Mrs.

Smith’s Digital Storytelling Unit 1

Case Study: ​Mrs. Smith’s Digital Storytelling Unit

Joseph DiBello

NYIT
Case Study: Mrs. Smith’s Digital Storytelling Unit 2

Case Study: Mrs. Smith’s Digital Storytelling Unit

Teacher

Mrs. Smith is a 9th grade english teacher in a public school in westchester county. She

teaches 5 sections of 9th grade english, two of which are co-taught ESL classes. She has not used

much technology nor has she changed her curricula in a few years. She has been working to

revamp all of her lessons this year but has struggled to integrate technology. She does use google

classroom in order to post assignments but rarely uses its features that integrate with the other

google apps. She has used google docs in a limited fashion since all of her students have school

issued chromebooks. She is very familiar with the tools that google docs has from the students

perspective. She already uses some google docs plugins such as ​Scribens​ which is a grammar

checking tool ​Text Help Study Skills​ (THSS) which is a highlighting tool for students to use. She

often uses this so students can highlight specific sections they would like feedback on when they

hand in their work.

The school itself has a very polarized population. A good portion of the students are

upper middle class to upper class. They come from families with strong parental support

systems. On the other end of the spectrum there is a very large hispanic community in the district

as well. Many of the students are first or second generation and may have limited abilities with

the english language. Forty percent of Mrs. Smith’s classes are inclusion and she needs to be sure

that she is bridging the gap between these two populations. In the past this has a been a big

reason for Mrs. Smith’s hesitation for using technology in her classes but since the school has

committed to 1:1 chromebooks for the students, she now has more opportunity to do this with

her given population.

Case Study: Mrs. Smith’s Digital Storytelling Unit 3

I felt that I could lend my expertise here as this is a teacher who wants to incorporate

more technology in her lessons but needs assistance. It was also a great opportunity because she

had all of the necessary tools in place to work with such as 1:1 chromebooks and google

classroom. This would be a place where we could work more on the technology and lesson

design itself as opposed to worrying about implementation and ensuring that the students had

access.

Previous Design

Unit Title:​ Telling our Origin Stories: The Individual and Society

Transfer Goals:

(1) Use narrative strategies and descriptive details to construct and develop personal

narratives of various forms.

(2) Develop our voices, adapting it to different structures and content.

(3) Examine defining events and context that reveal something about our narrative and

experiences to the reader.

Essential Understandings:

(1) Our origins and society often affect the way we view ourselves, as well as the

narrative we choose to tell about our experiences.

(2) We must often negotiate how others view our experiences with how we view

ourselves. In doing so, we not only make sense of our experiences, but those of others as

well.

(3) Narrative strategies do not only help the writer turn their experiences into stories, but

also help the reader access the author’s narrative.

Case Study: Mrs. Smith’s Digital Storytelling Unit 4

Essential Questions:

(1) How do our origins and society shape our stories?

(2) To what extent do the perceptions of others shape how we make meaning of our

narrative?

(3) How can narrative strategies help us make meaning of our stories?

Supporting Book: ​The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Summative Project: ​Multi Genre Project

This is a project that consists of a bunch of different writing genres that are collected and

presented together to form a cohesive thesis. In this project the teacher would lay out a

series of lessons where the students would study a certain type of literature and look at

how it gets a certain point across. After each one they develop their own. In the past Mrs

Smith has had her students read, analyze, and create the following genres:

● Song Lyrics

● Poem

● Short Story

● Editorial Cartoon

● Biography

● Argumentative Essay

● Informative Essay

● Personal Note/Letter

● Diary

● Email Exchange
Case Study: Mrs. Smith’s Digital Storytelling Unit 5

● Interview

● Advertisement

● Artwork

The students then collect all of their written work and present it in a portfolio. This is

often done on a posterboard or in a tabletop display.

Technology Integration

Google Apps:

The first piece that we worked on was enhancing student communication and feedback in

google apps. We worked on assigning a short story that was part of the the multi-genre project.

The project was submitted on google classroom. After the submission we met and discussed how

to give feedback directly on the papers. We talked about how this could be used to create a

meaningful drafting process and also how to track student submission times and revision history.

This was productive because Mrs. Smith also showed me ways to check for student plagiarism

using other programs.

ISTE-C 1d

ISTE-C 6a

Edpuzzle:

Mrs. Smith originally stated that she wants to flip her classroom. She said that she spends

a lot of in class time showing videos. One of these videos was a Ted talk by Matthew Winkler

about the Hero’s Journey. It is only a 5 minute video but we decided that this is a great place to

start. We used Edpuzzle to create questions to provoke the students thoughts about some of the
Case Study: Mrs. Smith’s Digital Storytelling Unit 6

central theme and how it relates to the reading. These questions were left very open ended in

order to gauge the students depth of knowledge and allow them to expand on the parts of the

video that they connected with.

Edpuzzle also showed the added benefit of being used as a form of pre assessment for the

topic. Mrs. Smith. She asked the students to give her an example of a hero’s journey in modern

day pop culture or media. This led to her being able to design a lesson around the interests of the

students that was differentiated and specified for her diverse group of students. I think this was a

big turning point in our Mentor/Mentee relationship as this was a moment where she was able to

realize the potential of using technology to flip the classroom and got real, positive results from

the datas it provided. As we moved forward she was definitely more keen to try and use

technology for data collection.

ISTE-C 2e

ISTE-C 2f

ISTE-C 2h

Adobe Spark

This was the biggest challenge for my Mentee. She really struggled to understand how

this part of the project was going to work. I created a sample for her in adobe spark of an

infinitely scrolling page with a few works of literature from different genres and youtube video

that was embedded in the page. After looking at my adobe spark final project she began to

understand the possibilities and feasibility for using this a substitution for her multi-genre

project. She then created a model for her students and distributed that on google classroom. We

then together looked at some of the previous projects that students handed in and thought about
Case Study: Mrs. Smith’s Digital Storytelling Unit 7

how we would create them digitally using Spark. Afterwards we developed a series of

suggestions for the students that give instructions on how to add different elements to the page in

certain ways. However, we were very careful to make sure that we emphasized that they did not

have to do things this way in order to foster some creativity.

ISTE-C 2c

ISTE-C 2d

Binumi

We decided to incorporate some video options into the recommendations for the

multi-genre project. We gave the students the suggestion of using binumi to create the videos.

Binumi hosts a large amount of stock video footage that the students can easily add a voiceover

too. This is a great match with the students chromebooks. It allows them to create and edit video

without needing to host any of the data on a hard drive. Many of the students created short

documentaries to add to their project.

Some problems did arise when using Binumi. The editing was extremely slow on the

students chromebooks and this often led to the audio that they recorded being out of sync with

the video. This really limited the time in class where Mrs. Smith could spend while showing her

students how to use Binumi. Even though the students spent a majority of their time working on

these videos at home, Mrs. Smith had to field a lot of questions from her students due to the lack

of actual development in class due to constant bug fixing. This is the technology that she is least

willing to incorporate next year.

ISTE-C 2c
Case Study: Mrs. Smith’s Digital Storytelling Unit 8

Discussion

Overall this was a very positive experience. I purposefully selected a Mentee that was an

english teacher who did not work in my school building. This teacher was still local so I was still

able to meet with her directly and engage in a person to person format. I often find myself

helping my fellow teachers with technology, specifically the google apps at my school so I really

wanted to step out of my comfort zone and I think it was a great fit. I think this was the first time

where I really felt like a coach and had to use some of the different tools that I encountered here

at NYIT.

I was fortunate though to have a mentee who really did want to start putting this kind of

stuff into her lessons. I feel that as a district’s technology coach this would not go as smoothly.

Many teachers are resistant to change and I think that presenting things in a way where we show

how to augment certain,m already existing, systems set up in a lesson is a great way of doing

this. I feel that I experienced this when My mentee and I explored Edpuzzle. By showing how

this tool is simply an extension of what she already does that just provides additional feedback

and data, it became something she was excited about and has gone on to use again in her

classroom without my help.