The Missing Print Mystery

Using a variety of tools, my digital literacy story is coming together. My digital story is created specifically for a few Kindergarteners in my class who are having difficulty remembering the concepts about print. I would use this book in the future in my career to teach concepts about print.

This book correlates with the following CCSS standards:

CCSS.RF.K.1-1. Demonstrate understanding of the organization and basic features of print.

a. Follow words from left to right, top to bottom, and page by page.

b. Recognize that spoken words are represented in written language by specific sequences of letters.

c. Understand that words are separated by spaces in print.

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CCSS.RF.1.1-1. Demonstrate understanding of the organization and basic features of print.

a. Recognize the distinguishing features

The idea of the story is that the main character of the book (a book) is trying to locate some elements of his story that went missing.  The story entails finding an author, illustrator, and editor to fix the main characters book.  Several features of a book are pointed out. The title, author, and illustrator are shown on the cover and title page. Then, the spine and back cover are shown with appropriate features. The print in the book is fixed, going from left to right, adding spaces between words, using capitalization, and punctuation. After the book is fixed, the editor checks out the book for errors, specifically pointing out the concepts about print that were fixed with color coded graphic symbols and labels.

As the ISTE standards for educators note, it is important to create learning experiences that are differentiated. The following ISTE standard strongly correlates with my digital story:

ISTE.5.A.

Use technology to create, adapt and personalize learning experiences that foster independent learning and accommodate learner differences and needs.

To create this story, I had to use several different websites and applications to create original pictures and diagrams that will be meaningful to my students.

First, I started with the website Popplet. I explored Popplet in a previous post as a brainstorming tool. I applied what I learned about Popplet as brainstorming tool, creating a story outline to follow.

Then, I used the application, PicsArt. This app helped me to add text and edit clip art images to personalize my story. I could even edit the main character, the book, to have facial features that go along with my story.

After that, I needed a way to include diagrams that students would easily understand. With Skitch, I could easily annotate the book, adding color coded arrows and text.

Next, I needed a way to get all of the images together to create the story. I created a powerpoint from the images used on PicsArt, and the text used from Popplet. The story was finally coming together, but it was missing an auditory element to make it more engaging and interesting.

Finally, I uploaded the powerpoint slides to Animoto, another tool I explored in previous blogs. Then, I could add background music to the slides, to make the digital story have an audio element as well.

Here is a copy of my digital story:

One thing that I would like to change in this book is adding voice, rather than background music. I can even get students engaged in the story by having students narrate. I can use a website such as Voicethread to add narration to each page of the story.

Also, I think that the video went a little too fast between slides, and the students would not be able to read at that rate. In addition, I would like to extend the digital story even further, by providing some type of assessment at the end of the story, holding students accountable for what they learned, as well as assessing how well this digital story helped teach concepts about print. Otherwise, I am excited to share this story with my Kindergarten class and colleagues. I couldn’t find any digital stories explicitly about teaching about CAP and I think that a lot of teachers could use this story to teach about CAP in the future.

I hope you enjoy my story! Please complete the survey below to let me know your thought and opinions about my story.