DIGITAL STORYTELLING WITH INTERACTIVE IMAGES: EXAMPLES FROM PRESCHOOL TO COLLEGE
(A presentation at the HundrED education innovation summit 2017 in Helsinki)
Students can learn to use technology at an early age, but at any age, there needs to be a healthy balance between digital consumption and production. As the web becomes increasingly visual, one of the best (and most engaging) ways to practice digital storytelling is creating interactive image or video documentaries with kids.
An interactive image can be a collage of multiple forms of text: written, audio, video, and photos that will enrich and give context to the viewing experience. A viewer can touch the things in the image to learn more, and this way, every 360 image becomes a potential discovery and learning platform.
Creating interactive image and video experiences is fun, but critical for learning is what happens before the actual editing. A good story requires planning, planning requires research, and research requires collaboration. Let’s look at some examples.
PRESCHOOL: Documenting observations in nature and engaging students to talk about them
In this project, teachers form Kellarpelto preschool in Finland have used 360 images for documenting children’s experience and discoveries on a forest walk and engaging them to memorize and talk about this experience later. On the walk, they took photos and videos of all kinds of things the children found: ants, snails, sticks, and frogs! Although children were very young, they where enthusiastic about touching the spots to see and hear the animals, and then imitating the animals themselves.
ELEMENTARY SCHOOL (2nd grade): Collecting materials for an interactive map
In this project 2nd grade students have enriched a map of their neighborhood with various kinds of materials that tell more about the places shown on the map. The photo itself creates a visual connection to otherwise separate stories that now together form a rich collection of information and memories of a shared living space.
ELEMENTARY SCHOOL (6th grade): Practicing media production skills by creating a virtual tour for a friendship school
6th graders from the city of Savonlinna created this tour for their friendship school in the US as part of a cultural exchange program. At this stage many students have good skills in using mobile devices. By taking closeup photos, recording video and audio students can practice various forms of media production and also find new ways to express themselves that best suits their style of learning.
SECONDARY AND HIGHER EDUCATION: documentaries and research projects
In higher education interactive images and videos can be used to create sophisticated documentaries from a research topic or from field trips and excursions. At this level background research and production plan should make up over half of the total production time. In this example students of Asian history in the College of Idaho created a virtual tour of Zhaojue Monastery, a Buddhist monastery in Chengdu.
VOCATIONAL TRAINING: simulations and development projects
A popular use case in vocational training is simulating work spaces and situations with integrated training materials and tutorials. Similarly, a group of students can use interactive images to communicate observations and issues in a service flow or spatial design. This is an introduction to Jungheinrich trucks for students of logistics in Finland.
Across the different grade levels, the younger the student, the bigger is the role of the teacher, and vice versa. This also means that teachers need training and support in finding the right ways to integrate new technology in their teaching.
In all examples there is one important common theme: interactive image creation gives students an opportunity to demonstrate their learning using their own voice, literally, via textual, audio or video narration. This is important for creating both cognitive and emotional engagement to the subject of the study.
