Design-Based Learning (DBL) and Challenge Learning

Design-Based Learning (DBL) and Challenge Learning

Posted in 4-7, 8-12, AppliedDesignSkillsTechnologies, artSTEAM, K-3, sciSTEAM | Tagged with , , , , ,

“… we learn by doing.”

So observed Aristotle in his study on how we should live, The Nicomachean Ethics, a work that is named – so scholars think – out of fondness for Aristotle’s father and son, both of whom were named Nicomachus.

While obviously not a new concept to educators, the principle of learning-by-doing has been applied in one particular framework, credited to UCLA professor Doreen Nelson, called Design-Based Learning (DBL). Also sometimes called Project- or Problem-Based Learning (PBL), DBL / PBL encourages students to think about how to address a problem in its context, specifically by thinking with the end in mind. As a formal methodology in contemporary education, DBL / PBL gained wider recognition during the 1990s, particularly as the oncoming millennium posed the perceived need for students to learn what popularly became known as 21st century skills.

DBL / PBL methods encourage experiential learning as a way to overcome student disengagement (Kim, Suh, & Song, 2015; Washor & Mojkowski, 2014), such as increasing the enrolment of women in the field of Information Technology (Jessup & Sumner, 2005). DBL / PBL enables students and their teachers to make use of prior learning to address authentic experiences and so-called real-world problem-solving (Wang, Derry, & Ge, 2017) as compared to the more sheltered lessons and linear hypotheticals of the traditional classroom.

Read more about Doreen Nelson in this article and stay in touch with the latest developments on her DBL website.

Typically, as students grow they also discover their own unique predilections, whether these arise from their personal passions or as a result of working alongside their peers. By facilitating and fostering its participants’ capabilities, DBL / PBL methods ideally turn out a multidisciplinary cohort that possesses diverse skills and interests as well as the maturity to envision and tackle a wide variety of challenges.

Visit the Design based learning: STEM & Simple Machines blog post for a resource shared by UBC Engineering Geering Up Educators.

Create, Make, Innovate: Getting Hands-on with Learning Design

Recap of the session in the Scarfe Foyer – Fall 2019:

This week, Create, Make, Innovate! was pleased to be part of the Educational Technology Support (ETS) unit’s TEC Expo, held on Tuesday, October 22nd, 2019 in the Scarfe foyer.

ETS describes the Technology Enhanced Classroom (TEC) exposition as “designed to showcase and celebrate creative and innovative uses of technology in face-to-face, blended, and online classrooms within the Faculty of Education.” Teacher candidates (TCs) roamed a gallery of exhibit tables spread across the foyer, mingling with the presenters and with faculty and staff from a number of departments around campus. On display were topics and technologies ranging from coding and physics to biology and geology, each designed in its own manner to engage students inside the classroom while inspiring them in ways beyond.

At the Create, Make, Innovate! table, TCs faced hands-on design challenges, which they could try to solve using only the materials provided. One challenge was to build the tallest possible free-standing tower, using items such as drinking cups or pipe cleaners. (Believe it or not, this challenge could even be posed using sheets of newspaper!) One successful tower of cups lasted nearly an hour before finally toppling over after a nudge on the table!

A wooden catapult by Specific Love Creations (YouTube screenshot: “How to make a Catapult for Kids” – posted Nov 20, 2013)

A second challenge was to construct a device or conveyance of some kind that could transfer a small object – like a cotton ball or a Lego character – from one shoreline to another across an imaginary body of water, which were simple paper cut-outs laid atop the display table. One clever catapult, made from wooden craft sticks and elastic bands, nearly launched a cotton ball all the way across! *thanks for the inspiration for this activity from U of Calgary’s Doucette Library WestCast 2019 presentation.

Other ideas for the shoreline-to-shoreline challenge could be constructing a zipline or a bridge, again using only those items available, as provided by the teacher. Although something like a bridge might seem straightforward, like all engineering projects it definitely also requires careful forethought. The results can be pretty amazing – they might even win their designers top prize in a contest! In our session this week, however, we wanted all our materials to be reusable, so we avoided using glue or building a more permanent structure (although these can be amazing, too, not to mention sturdy!)

Read more below about how to make a catapult of your own, as well as some other clever ideas that can challenge students and stir their creative thinking.

A craft staple: the popsicle stick! Free photo available for download at Canva

Resources

British Columbia’s K–12 curriculum features a subject discipline called Applied Design, Skills, and Technologies (ADST), which “builds on students’ natural curiosity, inventiveness, and desire to create and work in practical ways” in order to “… provide firm foundations for lifelong learning.” As early as Kindergarten, students can take a role in learning how to apply ADST principles such as cross-disciplinary thinking, collaboration, and contextualised problem-solving.

One quick design challenge is a toy catapult made simply from a handful of wooden craft sticks and three elastic bands. This catapult is an amusing way for students to observe Newton’s Laws of Motion and the force of gravity while appreciating properties like potential and kinetic energy and concepts like leverage. Likewise, other simple machines, as basic as a door wedge or a threaded screw, can serve as readily understandable physical models for young children.

For older students, biomimicry can offer fascinating design challenges as well as readily perceived connections to the natural environment. Critical making is another avenue that directs older students toward linkages between innovative digital technologies and broader society, in ways that are mindful of those designs and their consequences.

Acknowledgement: post author, Scott Robertson; editor, Yvonne Dawydiak

Special thanks to ETS UBC for including us in your event!

Interdisciplinarity, collaboration, hands-on learning – that’s the spirit of Create, Make, Innovate! We want to promote enthusiasm for sharing and learning across age groups and across subject disciplines.

Make, Create, Innovate sessions took place during the Fall 2019 in the foyer of the Neville B. Scarfe building and were hosted by Scott Robertson, a project assistant on a small TLEF grant with Dr. Lorrie Miller, Dr. Marina-Milner Bolotin and Yvonne Dawydiak, Teacher Education.

If you have an idea or an inspiration for a resource or future session, please let us know! scarfe.sandbox@ubc.ca

References

Aristotle. (1999). Nicomachean Ethics (W. D. Ross, Trans.). Kitchener, ON: Batoche Books.

Jessup, E. & Sumner, T. (2005). Design-based learning and the participation of women in IT. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 26(1), 141-147.

Kim, P., Suh, E., & Song, D. (2015). Development of a design-based learning curriculum through design-based research for a technology-enabled science classroom. Educational Technology Research and Development, 63(4), 575–602.

Wang, M., Derry, S., & Ge, X. (2017). Fostering deep learning in problem-solving contexts with the support of technology. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 20(4), 162–165.

Washor, E. & Mojkowski, C. (2014). Student disengagement: It’s deeper than you think. The Phi Delta Kappan, 95(8), 8–10.

Featured Photo Credit: Maria Georgieva at pexels.com

CBC Curio.ca

Posted in 4-7, 8-12, K-3, Not Subject Specific, Paid | Tagged with , , , , , , ,

A Virtual Third Place: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation / Société Radio-Canada.

On November 2, 1936, Canada’s federal government under Prime Minister Richard Bennett created the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation / Société Radio-Canada, a Crown-owned media corporation.

The CBC commenced radio broadcasts later that year, followed by television broadcasts in 1952. The decision to institute a public broadcasting service was twofold: firstly, to counter the influence of American broadcasts, a motive that remains to this day, and secondly, to help Canadians stay informed and in touch across the country’s vast geography. By way of transmission on radio waves accessible to Canadians using electrical devices, this country established a technological public space, something we would call in today’s vernacular a “virtual” third place – read more about “the third place” below.

L’évolution de l’identité visuelle de CBC / ICI Radio-Canada de 1940 à nos jours.
Photo: Radio-Canada

Since its inception, CBC/Radio-Canada has been a leading provider of national and international news and cultural, educational, and informational programming, including long-running series such as The Nature of Things, Quirks and Quarks, Ideas, Marketplace, and the fifth estate. In recent years, as new technologies have influenced the way people access programming, changes to formatting and delivery have been necessary to maintain the CBC’s audience numbers (McGuire, 2009). Those changes include the addition of a web-based resource called CBC Curio.ca.

Curio.ca is CBC’s educational streaming subscription service. Available on the site are stories from the English television news broadcast, The National, and its French counterpart, Le téléjournal, as well as segments from national and local radio news and feature episodes from regular television broadcasts. Curio.ca also hosts arts and entertainment programming, including performances from the Stratford Festival, CBC/Radio-Canada drama and comedy programs, and a range of children’s programming.

UBC students, faculty, staff, and on-site Library users have access to Curio.ca’s thousands of television shows and radio programs as well as teacher guides and K–12 curriculum connections. Available in both English and French, the programs and teacher guides cover a wide range of topics suitable for all ages. Although UBC doesn’t currently have access to the BBC and National Geographic content, Curio.ca remains a superb resource for complementing and extending lesson activities and assignments.

“Information flows freely and rapidly across borders, creating instant access to international news events. For global literacy to become integral to the [school] experience, [educators] must discover ways to make it relevant in the classroom.” (Petrausch, 2005, p. 5)

Create, Make, Innovate: Getting Hands-on with Learning Design

Recap of the session in the Scarfe Foyer in the Fall of 2019:

At this week’s Create, Make, Innovate! activity session, on Tuesday, October 15th, 2019, teacher candidates (TCs) explored the on-line planning resource, CBC Curio.ca.

Thanks to some interactive facilitation by Graduate Academic Assistant, Jennifer Abel, and Education Librarian, Wendy Traas, TCs were led through some guided browsing of the Curio.ca collection. Using the site’s quick navigation search tool, they were able to see and assess for themselves the various programming resources and curricular guides that are available. These guides make use of existing provincial curricula, making them more immediately applicable than a more generic teacher guide might be.

Downloadable image available from https://www.cbc.ca/curiopromokit/creative-assets

Navigating through the Curio.ca resources is similar to searching the Scarfe Digital Sandbox. A diverse selection of programming can be searched by category, age group, language (English or French), or subject. Toolbar headings and sub-headings arrange various “collections” of programming and resources into different “categories.” These identifiers overlap, which makes for more thorough searches that turn up specific results each time. Although this means that search results eventually grow repetitive, the Curio catalogue goes back a long way – English content dates back to the 1960s and French back to the 1940s, which is nearly back to the beginning of CBC/Radio-Canada!

“Curio.ca gives teachers and students streaming access to the best in educational video and audio from CBC and Radio-Canada. You’ll find documentaries from television and radio, news reports, and more…”

– from CBC Curio.ca

Resources

One issue-driven collection in the Curio.ca resources is called “Fake News and Misinformation,” which offers a series of sub-topics, e.g. Bias and Reliability, Disinformation and Lies, Safeguarding Social Media, each with its own catalogue of short, informative video features and news reports. By selecting several videos, perhaps in concert with an historical article from The New York Review of Books, an international study on addressing the spread of misinformation, and a report from the Pew Research Center, a Secondary teacher or a group of teachers could have the makings of a robust unit plan, addressing concerns as well as responses to the issue of fake news.

In a related story, there’s potential for an interdisciplinary investigation by “combining the expertise of both the social sciences and computer science” into an automated analysis that can help “news aggregators to detect and visualize the occurrence of potential media bias in real time” (Hamborg, Donnay, & Gipp, 2018).

Finally, based on Wilhite’s (2015) fascinating interdisciplinary study of how reporting style itself influences news audiences, students and teachers might even decide to practise applying their evaluative skills while using the Curio.ca site, itself.

For a look into our country’s cultural and media history, or for some rich lesson planning ideas, check out Canada’s very own trustworthy on-line public news resource, CBC Curio.ca.

More about “The Third Place”

Have you ever heard of Ray Oldenburg and the Third Place?

No, it’s not a music venue or public house although you’re on the right track.

Oldenburg was an American sociologist who proposed the idea that we spend our lives in cultural “places,” the “first” being home, the “second” being work, and the “third” – no less significant – comprising various public venues where we come together and share company. Today, these might be plazas and high streets, where cafés, pubs, markets, salons, and all variety of hangouts and community centres line the sidewalks. According to Oldenburg, this third place and its togetherness are vital to sustaining a healthy democracy.

Cultural practice of the Third Place concept traces a long, absorbing history. In Ancient Greece, the agora was a city-state’s literal “gathering place,” where spiritual, cultural, political, and even military circles conjoined. Much later, in the 15th century, Islamic culture introduced a smaller but equally potent space, the coffee-house, which spread from the Arabian peninsula to Istanbul and beyond, to places as far away as Venice, Oxford, and London. Among its many social functions, the coffee-house became an interdisciplinary centre, a hub for cultural debates, news reports, and the general exchange of information between people from uncommon walks of life and status, all taking place in an atmosphere far less formal than a university, trade centre, or government house (White, 2018).

“A Coffee House in the Time of Charles II
From a wood cut of 1674” (Ukers, 1922, p. 60)

Today, a common comparison of the coffee-house is made to social media. The analogy is apt: Pew Research Center recently reported that “those who use social media… are more regularly exposed to people who have different backgrounds and more connected with friends they don’t see in person.” Pew also reported that, at the outset of the 21st century, “digital platforms [played] a larger role in news consumption, and… [seemed] to be more than making up for modest declines in the audience for traditional [primarily physical print] platforms” (p. 1). Furthermore, the influence of social media and search engines had made peoples’ news gathering and consumption habits more intermittent.

Certainly, apps and platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and Facebook play with Oldenburg’s concept of the Third Place in ways that denizens of the coffee-house might have appreciated today yet could not have imagined in their time. For its dearth of in-person contact, arguably its fundamental feature, social media’s once-removed stance is also critiqued as an insidious pitfall. Where a coffee-houser had as much assurance as we do that what they learned might be true, they were linked neither instantaneously nor indiscriminately to all other coffee-housers simultaneously but sat face to face across from only those with whom they spoke. Such is the potential of the Third Place on-line today, that our interaction with social media might actually serve to undermine us, unless we take active and careful precaution.

Read more from Royal Roads University about how young people engage with politics via social media, and about the role that social media plays in politics within smaller communities.

Acknowledgement: post author, Scott Robertson; editor, Yvonne Dawydiak

Interdisciplinarity, collaboration, hands-on learning – that’s the spirit of Create, Make, Innovate! We want to promote enthusiasm for sharing and learning across age groups and across subject disciplines.

Make, Create, Innovate sessions took place during the Fall 2019 in the foyer of the Neville B. Scarfe building and were hosted by Scott Robertson, a project assistant on a small TLEF grant with Dr. Lorrie Miller, Dr. Marina-Milner Bolotin and Yvonne Dawydiak, Teacher Education.

If you have an idea or an inspiration for a resource or future session, please let us know! scarfe.sandbox@ubc.ca

References

Hamborg, F., Donnay, K., & Gipp, B. (2018, November). Automated identification of media bias in news articles: An interdisciplinary literature review. International Journal on Digital Libraries, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-018-0261-y

McGuire, Jennifer. (2009). “Biggest change in history of CBC News: What it means to you”. Cbc.ca. Last updated October 26, 2009. Retrieved October 2, 2019 from https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/biggest-change-in-history-of-cbc-news-what-it-means-to-you-1.864143

Petrausch, R. J. (2005). Five strategic imperatives for interdisciplinary study in mass communications / media studies in the U.S. and U.K. International College Teaching Methods & Styles Journal, 1(3), 1–10.

Ukers, W. H. (1922). All about coffee. New York, NY: The Tea and Coffee Trade Journal Company. https://archive.org/stream/allaboutcoffee00ukeruoft#mode/1up

White, M. (2018, June 21). Newspapers, gossip, and coffee-house culture. Retrieved from https://www.bl.uk/restoration-18th-century-literature/articles/newspapers-gossip-and-coffee-house-culture

Wilhite, C. J. (2015). Mass news media and American culture: An interdisciplinary approach. Behavior and Social Issues, 24, 88–110. doi: 10.5210/bsi.v.24i0.5004

Many thanks to Jennifer Abel for helping contribute to this week’s blog entry as well as facilitating the activity session!

UNLOCK Library Literacies: game-based learning leads to critical reflection

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The library’s approach is similar to a BreakoutEdu game. (Photo: sobolicha11)

Teacher Candidates (TCs) in the BEd program at UBC Vancouver experienced an interactive session in the Education Library as part of their orientation to the library and to library and information literacies. The Education Librarians developed a series of questions and delivered these questions to students working in groups via a randomized qualtrics survey. The questions on the survey were intended to prompt critical thinking and discussion as students physically explored the library. As they completed tasks at various stations in the library, the survey tool provided TCs with a numerical code. Once they completed all of the tasks, they had the numbers they need to UNLOCK a treasure box from which they could select a prize (ex. trinkets, candy and swag). This approach proved engaging and also elicited some excellent questions and ideas! If you are looking for resources to support planning and integrating games in learning, you might find this blog post of value.

Reflecting on Student Reflections: Inquiry Insights from Teacher Education Students

Education Librarians were impressed by the quality of responses from students in the Unlock Library Literacy workshops in LLED 350 and LLED 360. As part of the learning activities during the workshops in September 2019, teacher education students were asked to consider what questions they had about incorporating digital technology into the classroom, and how to integrate Indigenous perspectives and principles. Especially considering they were in the first few weeks of the teacher education program, the thoughfulness demonstrated by students in response to these questions was noteworthy.

Many responses to these questions would make for great inquiry questions to explore throughout the year so we are sharing them with you here. We teamed up with Yvonne Dawydiak to think about how to move some of this learning forward. In this post we describe some of the feedback students submitted, and point to opportunities and resources to support further inquiry on the topics.

Digital Technology Integration

Working in small groups, students were asked to consider the following question as part of the Coding and Computational Thinking station:

What questions do you have about working with digital technology in the classroom?

Responses to this prompt included practical considerations of accessing and managing digital technology in the classroom, cross curricular connections, ensuring equitable access to technology, questions about where educators can improve their knowledge of computational thinking, and how to balance engagement with distraction. A selection of student responses are listed below:

  • How can we keep students on task and not distracted by the really cool digital technology that facilitates the learning?
  • How would we integrate an activity like coding into an ELA classroom?
  • How do we make these kinds of learning opportunities more accessible for lower income school districts?
  • How do we choose what tech to invest in within budget limitations?
  • How do you incorporate full class participation when you only have access to limited devices?
  • How do we find balance between being a part of the digital world and not let it take over?
  • How to teach kids to be digitally literate and safe online?
  • How do we teach healthy relationships with an reliance on technology?
  • What are some adaptations for visually impaired students?
  • How do you work with a technology you’ve never used before? What resources do teachers use to keep up with techological advances?
  • From what age is it appropriate to introduce digital technology?

Further Learning Opportunities

Teacher Candidates will find information to support some of the above questions on the Scarfe Digital Sandbox. Resource posts include information about Assistive technologies, teaching digital citizenship, coding, multimedia creation and much more. Blog posts are more comprehensive descriptions of pedagogical approaches that might integrate digital technologies to support authentic learning opportunities.  https://scarfedigitalsandbox.teach.educ.ubc.ca/

In addition to this online resource, Teacher Candidates are invited to bring their questions and ideas to some drop-in opportunities this year:

  • Scarfe Tea Party:
    Mondays, 4:00-5:30 in Scarfe 155, Education Library
    Please RSVP https://scarfedigitalsandbox.teach.educ.ubc.ca/events/event/scarfe-tea-party/
  • Create, Make Innovate: hands on STEAM activities
    Every Tuesday this Fall, 12:00 – 1:00 in the Scarfe Foyer
  • Drop in learning design: Scarfe Sandbox Support.
    Weekly topics include coding, making, multimedia creation, lesson planning foundations, hooks and activating prior knowledge
    Every Wednesday this Fall, 11:00 – 1:30 in Scarfe 1007

These events are hosted by Yvonne Dawydiak, Learning Design Manager, Teacher Education and are intended to allow opportunities for TCs to have hands on experiences to develop their understandings as well as providing time for TCs to bring their questions about any aspect of planning and preparation during their BEd year.

Another excellent Canadian source of information about digital citizenship including ways to help your students grapple with many of the weighty questions we saw in the Teacher Candidate’s responses to our question, can be found on the MediaSmarts website: http://mediasmarts.ca/

Incorporating Indigenous Perspectives

Working in small groups, students were asked to consider the following question as part of the Critical Literacy and Indigenous Perspectives station:

What questions do you have about selecting and integrating Indigenous perspectives and principles into the classroom?

Students raised questions of how to determine authenticity in texts, how non-Indigenous educators can respectfully teach Indigenous ways of knowing, finding local resources and information, designing appropriate activities, interdiscplinary connections, understanding protocols around knowledge sharing, and finding age-appropriate ways to engage with the legacy of colonization in Canada. A selection of student responses are listed below:

  • What are some ways we can ensure that the material we are selecting is authentic and appropriate? How can we ensure authenticity and avoid cultural appropriation?
  • How do I know when I’ve seelcted the right piece of literature?
  • What avenues are there for finding Indigenous voices in youth literature?
  • As non Indigenous educators, how can we be sure that Indigenous resources that we want to use in class is authentic and true? How do we approach this without overstepping boundaries?
  • How do we navigate such a politically charged subject and teach the principles respectfully, but with confidence?
  • Is it worth sharing cultural appropriation texts as a way to educate students about Indigenous people and colonization?
  • How can we be inclusive of the multiple identities that fall under the Indigenous umbrella term? How can we connect learners to their own ancestry?
  • How do we connect with the nation whose land we’re taching on and what are the protocols?
  • What consultation should we do if we want to do Indigenous projects in our classrooms?
  • Are there resources we can use to facilitate collaboration with Indigenous educators in relation to incorporating these perspectives and principles into all areas of studies?
  • How to approach difficult topics with younger children and is there an age appropriate way to discuss racism and false representation and appropriation?
  • What is the best way to integrate Indigenous perspectives and principles into STEM classes?

Further Learning Opportunities

Check out the First Nations Education Steering Committee (FNESC) website (www.fnesc.ca) , especially:

Explore the Education Library themed booklists, especially these ones:

The Indigenous Education Program in the UBC Faculty of Education hosts events including elder visits for staff, students and faculty such as a Tea Making Workshop with Alannah Young on October 21, 2019 as part of the Visiting Elder & Knowledge Keeper Series.

UBC has a calendar of Aboriginal-related events on campus: http://aboriginal.ubc.ca/events/ 

Multimodal Learning and Multimedia Technologies

Posted in 4-7, 8-12, AppliedDesignSkillsTechnologies, artSTEAM, K-3, multimedia creation, Not Subject Specific, techSTEAM | Tagged with , , , , , ,

Multimodal and multimedia – are they the same?

Multimodalities comprise symbols and our decisions to use them as well as our interpretations of them. For instance, the letters and words of this blog entry represent a visual mode of language that, taken together, present a text to an audience – it’s something we read!

As teachers plan for literacy instruction, we need to keep in mind the visual, textual, kinesthetic and auditory modes of communication. Literacy and the development of the communication competencies are not just about reading and writing!

Multimedia comprises the various types of presentations that we can select to exhibit our chosen symbols – instead of a blog entry or some other print media, it could be an audiobook, which is an aural mode of language, or a video, which is both visual and aural.

Jason Tham from Texas Tech offers a great explanation for differentiating multimodal from multimedia while Claire Lauer (2009) concludes that how we use each word is perhaps better understood contextually.

Just as every square is a rectangle but not every rectangle is a square, so every multimodal project is multimedia but not every multimedia project is multimodal. (Tham, 2015)

Transfer

Alongside multimodal learning is the concept of learning transfer. By relating “past knowledge” to a “current challenge,” we facilitate for ourselves a more general theory, which helps us to transpose or “transfer” something previously learned into new situations (Shepherd, 2018, p. 109). Sometimes, the transfer seems fairly obvious: we understand the words of this blog entry after learning how to read and write.

Other times, though, multimodal learning is not so taken for granted. It can become challenging if it requires more intentional reflection or speculation, such as when students are asked to remember something from last year or imagine how today’s lessons might help in the future.

Multimodal learning might even require students to connect seemingly unrelated experiences, whether literally or metaphorically. For example, Shepherd (2018) likens driving a car to driving a truck, which is fairly obvious, and then to skiing, which requires a more studious comparison. That can be challenging if students don’t readily see any relevance or similarity between these experiences. And the comparisons don’t need to be immediately scholarly. Could reading a meme, posting on Instagram, or playing Guitar Hero count as experience for coursework?

Of course, students will bring more to the classroom than video games and social media. But it’s by helping students, on their own terms, to build upon what they already know that teachers can facilitate multimodal transfer of learning. At the same time, using multimodal and multimedia tools, teachers can expand their own repertoire, maybe even in ways they didn’t know were possible (Savage & Vogel, 1996).

Create, Make, Innovate: Getting Hands-on with Learning Design

Recap of the session in the Scarfe Foyer Fall 2019:

Lights, camera… action! And action. And action. And action!

At this week’s Create, Make, Innovate! activity session, on Tuesday, October 8th, 2019, Teacher Candidates had the chance to take the Director’s chair and make some fun animated movies using a downloadable moviemaking app called Stop Motion Studio.

After just a few minutes of play and experimentation, this app readily offers users plenty of potential for conveying ideas visually to an audience. And, of course, time invested in a more meticulous approach soon demonstrates just how precise that decision-making can become. The results can be spectacular, as seen in this little mashup video put together by Eric Lee to showcase some lovely examples of stop motion video.

Resources

Check out the Scarfe Digital Sandbox for a variety of other multimodal tools, including Explain Everything, ShowMe, and ScribJab, as well as multimedia technologies such as Haiku Deck, Animoto, and Book Creator.

Each of these apps has its own focus, which can help teachers conduct specific assessments and meet particular objectives. By complementing, supplementing, and extending our approaches to teaching and learning, all of these apps can help students learn to express themselves independently in engaging, creative ways.

“To glimpse the promise of multimedia and judge the extent to which we should invest our energies in it, we need to look beyond current applications… [and consider] the potential range of its uses.” (Savage & Vogel, 1996, p. 127)

Acknowledgement: post author, Scott Robertson; editor, Yvonne Dawydiak

Interdisciplinarity, collaboration, hands-on learning – that’s the spirit of Create, Make, Innovate! We want to promote enthusiasm for sharing and learning across age groups and across subject disciplines.

Make, Create, Innovate sessions took place during the Fall 2019 in the foyer of the Neville B. Scarfe building and were hosted by Scott Robertson, a project assistant on a small TLEF grant with Dr. Lorrie Miller, Dr. Marina-Milner Bolotin and Yvonne Dawydiak, Teacher Education.

If you have an idea or an inspiration for a resource or future session, please let us know! scarfe.sandbox@ubc.ca

References

Lauer, C. (2009, December). Contending with terms: “Multimodal” and “Multimedia” in the academic and public spheres. Computers and Composition, 26(4), 225–239. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2009.09.001

Savage, T. M. & Vogel, K. E. (1996, Fall). Multimedia: A revolution in higher education? College Teaching, 44(4), 127–131. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/stable/27558793

Shepherd, R. P. (2018, June). Digital writing, multimodality, and learning transfer: Crafting connections between composition and online composing. Computers and Composition, 48, 103–114. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2018.03.001

Feature Photo Credit: Mohamed Hassan on Stockvault

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