Digital storytelling at school

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Eventually, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) 4Kids's StoryBuilder is one of the rare ... 1001 stories is offered as a free web service and does not ... 1001 stories is very easy to use: even people with minimal technological background.
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Int. J. Arts and Technology, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2014

Digital storytelling at school: what kind of educational benefits? Nicoletta Di Blas* HOC – Hypermedia Open Center, Politecnico di Milano, Via Ponzio 34/5 – 20133 Milano, Italy E-mail: [email protected] *Corresponding author

Luca Ferrari Education Sciences Faculty, Università di Bologna, Via Filippo Re 6 – 40126 Bologna, Italy E-mail: [email protected] Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the potential of digital storytelling in the context of formal education for fostering substantial educational benefits. Our discussion is based on a five-year experience with digital storytelling in Italian classes of all school grades (from pre-school) that has involved almost 15,000 students, and on the data from surveys, direct interviews and focus groups with hundreds of teachers. The results show that students do achieve a number of benefits, both direct (i.e., curricular, traditional…) and indirect (i.e.., non-curricular, non-traditional, like, for example, a professional attitude). We draw conclusions regarding what we deem to be the key ingredients of this successful experience, among which the concrete implementation in each class stands out as prominent. Keywords: digital storytelling; instructional design; educational benefits; digital learning; computer supported collaborative learning. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Di Blas, N. and Ferrari, L. (2014) ‘Digital storytelling at school: what kind of educational benefits?’, Int. J. Arts and Technology, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp.38–54. Biographical notes: Nicoletta Di Blas is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Electronics and Information of Politecnico di Milano. She graduated in classics and obtained her PhD in Linguistic Sciences from The Catholic University, Milan. She teaches communication theory for Politecnico di Milano and communication for cultural heritage for the University of Lugano, Switzerland, at the Technology-Enhanced Communication for Cultural Heritage Master. She is a member of HOC-LAB of Politecnico di Milano (http://www.hoc.elet.polimi.it). Her research interests focus on multimedia, multi-channel communication, eLearning (digital storytelling, educational experiences based on MUVEs) and impact evaluation. Her two main application fields are eCulture and eLearning.

Copyright © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

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Luca Ferrari is a Research Collaborator at the Faculty of Education, University of Bologna. He has been involved in several national and European research projects, among which: Learnin4All (on technology in school, with an emphasis on inclusion) and Classi 2.0 (also on relevant uses of technology in education). He collaborates with HOC-LAB of Politecnico di Milano, both in research activities and as a Teacher for the DOL (online diploma for ICT-enhanced education). His research interest comprises the relationships between new technology and learning, with a special focus on disability. He is also currently active as a trainer in two main fields: technologies to reducing handicap and design and development of learning artefacts. This paper is a revised and expanded version of a paper entitled ‘Kids create multimedia stories: an ‘authentic’ educational value?’ presented at ACM IDC 2010 International Conference in Interaction Design and Children, Barcelona, Spain, 9–12 June 2010.

1

Introduction

Most e-learning activities in formal education (i.e., at school, as part of a curricular activity) are introduced in view of supporting the achievement of educational benefits, like enhanced understating/knowledge about a subject matter, skills acquisition (typically technical skills), increased ‘media literacy’ (i.e., the capability of communicating with ICT), etc. It is less often the case for teachers to implement an ICT-based activity in view of making the students ‘aware of what a deadline is’, ‘keener to share with their parents what they do at school’, ‘more willing to cooperate with the teachers’ or ‘more motivated in school activities in general’. These benefits are not officially included in any school system’s programme: we may call them ‘atypical’, ‘peripheral’, ‘indirect’ (as if they were a side-effect), non-curricular… (Di Blas and Ferrari, 2010). In spite of the negative semantics of these labels, they are highly desirable: they make students better students, they strengthen community bonds at various levels (within the class, with the teachers, with the families, within the local community…), they leave a mark. This paper is about the direct and indirect benefits of an ICT-based activity in school: digital storytelling. It is based on the large amount of data gathered in the frame of the PoliCultura initiative, by HOC-LAB of Politecnico di Milano (http://www.policultura.it), in which pupils, of all school grades, produce multimedia ‘narratives’. PoliCultura has actively involved so far almost 15,000 Italian pupils, from school year 2006 (see Table 1). The extensive monitoring of the impact has included online questionnaires, interviews, focus groups with the teachers as well as the analysis of the students’ artefacts performed each year by a panel of experts. The digital storytelling activity turns out to be like a pebble thrown in a pond: it does not only promote direct benefits, (i.e., improvements in terms of knowledge, skills and attitudes), but also indirect benefits, like a professional attitude, improved relationships between teacher and students, the involvement of families and of the community at large, etc. The paper is organised as follows: after going through the most relevant related works, we introduce our case-study, the PoliCultura initiative. We present the data on the benefits achieved by the participants and then we outline what in our opinion are the key ingredients that make the experience effective.

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Related work

Digital storytelling is quite a huge field: due to the focus of this paper, we shall concentrate here on systems that allow authoring multimedia digital stories rather than passive consumption (Iurgel et al., 2009). Authoring tools for digital storytelling have been mainly developed for (very) young children, being the educational value of authoring a story strongly backed by those pedagogical theories that consider learning as knowledge building rather than knowledge transmission (Feher, 2008; Jonassen and Land, 2000). A number of tools have been developed to support this activity, both in the academic and commercial arena. Still, commercial products tend to see users more as listeners than authors and if they are considered as the authors, then they are generally provided with readymade characters with which they can play role-games at the most. These products are often CD-ROM-based, they impose strong limitations to creativity and almost never allow cooperation or sharing of the stories with other peers (Antle, 2003). Therefore, to see ‘real creativity’ at work, one must turn to academic prototypes and projects (Cassell, 2008). Many approaches make use of physical elements to trigger the process of story-making. For example, MITs StoryMat records and recalls children’s voices as they play with stuffed animals on a colourful, story-evoking, quilt (Cassell and Ryokai, 2001). Other approaches, like Sage (Bers and Cassell, 1998) and PET (Druin et al., 1999), integrate tangible elements (like stuffed animals) into the technology-enhanced storytelling process. StoryRoom also adopts a physical approach by providing kids with room-sized Interactive Storytelling spaces where they share a theatrical experience (Alborzi et al., 2000). Other approaches make use of virtual environments in which the stories take place, like Puppet, an autonomous agents-populated virtual environment where children play multiple roles in creating narratives (Marshall et al., 2004). Collaborative storytelling has also been explored, but mostly at experimental level: MOOSE crossing, for example, allows kids to cooperatively design and build objects and virtual characters in a virtual space (Bruckman, 1997). The FaTe project allows very young kids (ages 5 to 8) to develop stories together in a shared 3D environment (Garzotto and Forfori, 2006). ToonTastic is a tool, still in its beta phase, meant to enable children to collaboratively create a story using an interactive, multiple-pen display (Russell, 2010). Eventually, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) 4Kids’s StoryBuilder is one of the rare examples of large-scale exploitation of a digital storytelling system. Children can create multimedia comix-style stories, based on the typical mechanism of ‘add-a-sentence-to-a-story’. They can then save their stories in an online personal space and also publish them and share them with friends, via e-mail (Antle, 2003). Digital drawing, especially if collaborative, has also been considered a form of storytelling, like in the KidPad project (Benford et al., 2000).

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The case-study: PoliCultura

PoliCultura is an initiative by HOC-LAB of Politecnico di Milano, started in school year 2006. HOC-LAB had developed at that time a tool (‘1001 stories’) for quick and easy production of multimedia narratives (i.e., quite short and pleasurable applications, based on video and audio), that was then used – and still is – by the lab’s staff in various fields: cultural heritage communication, e-tourism, corporate communication and so on (see Di

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Blas et al., 2010; Rubegni et al., 2010). Since the tool was quite easy to manage, we decided to offer the opportunity of using it to Italian schools, starting from high schools only in year 2006 and then progressively including all school grades. On the whole, almost 13,000 students and 1,100 teachers have taken part in PoliCultura so far (see Table 1). Table 1

PoliCultura: the participating classes (those who register vs. those that actually take part in the final competition) Registered classes

Year

2010/11 2009/10

Total Pre-school 381 332

33 23

2008/09

415

2007/08

339 104

2006/07 Total

1,571

Primary school

Classes that took part in the competition

Junior High high school school

133 137

97 80

118 92

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173

113

-

149

98

-

-

-

104

Total Pre-school

Primary school 68 51

Junior High high school school

175 140

15 10

47 35

45 44

90

191

25

69

57

40

92

129

-

55

36

38

56

-

-

-

56

691

If satisfied by the result of their efforts, teachers and pupils can decide to take part in a national competition that crowns the best works of the year. Roughly 1/3 of the participating classes actually submit the narrative to the competition: underestimation of the effort needed is the main cause for dropping out. A panel of experts, from the academia and the school, examines the submissions. The main criterion of evaluation is the pedagogical quality of the experience rather than the perfection of the final result.

3.1 The toolkit The 1001 stories toolkit allows creating multimedia applications that include audio, slideshows of images and texts. These applications are also multi-channel, in the sense that once generated they can be accessed by mobile devices (iPhone, iPad…) or downloaded on any device with a podcast player. 1001 stories is offered as a free web service and does not require any specific software installation. From a technological point of view, 1001stories is an engine, written in php, composed by three main parts: a data entry, a preview and a generator. The data entry is a simple authoring environment enabling the user to edit the editorial plan of the story and to enter content for each element. The preview allows to visualise at any moment of the process the contents inserted that far, as they will appear to the final user. The generator produces and publishes the final applications (for the different delivery channels). 1001 stories is very easy to use: even people with minimal technological background can handle it. The average learning time in primary school is 20 minutes. To make it even more usable, we provide schools with more limited features with respect to our professional version: e.g., schools can use slideshows only to illustrate their narrative (no video, no flash animations). The reason is that we want to encourage any teacher to take part, even those who are not confident with technology, and we want to allow them to achieve in a reasonable time/effort a good result. A too sophisticated tool would cut down participation dramatically.

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Figure 1 Web version (left) and mobile version (right) of a multimedia ‘narrative’ done with 1001 stories (pre-school class) (see online version for colours)

3.2 The ‘narratives’ We call the applications done with 1001 stories ‘narratives’. They are audio-based: content is the king while the visual communication just ‘goes with it’ and evokes what is being said. They are meant for a pleasurable, relaxed fruition: they present anecdotes, interesting pieces of information, quotes and episodes. The goal is to raise curiosity about issues, not to cover them fully. School can choose between two different formats (more are under development): the complete narrative, encompassing a set of main topics with a number of sub-topics (Figure 2), and the compact narrative, with just a linear set of topics. The authors can choose how many topics and sub-topics they want but they cannot modify the design (e.g., adding further navigation layers). Figure 2 The ‘complete narrative’ format (see online version for colours)

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Each item of content (be it a topic or a sub-topic) consists of an audio commentary, approximately one or two minutes long, that goes with a slideshow of images; the audio’s transcript is visible on demand (Figure 3). Figure 3 The web interface of a narrative (primary school, title: ‘Diego and the principle of flotation – adventures of a small pirate’) (see online version for colours)

Users can browse the content in a number of ways: they can get a general overview, by moving from one main topic to the next automatically, they can get all the pieces of content moving from one topic to its sub-topics and then to the next main topic (again, automatically), or select manually what they are interested in. When play lists are created, the set of main topics (thus again offering an overview of the content) are collected as well as the ‘chapters’ (i.e., each topic plus its sub-topics).

3.3 Schools’ participation Schools are notified of the initiative by the regional branches of the Italian Ministry for Education: the school principal can then ‘strongly encourage’ some teachers to take part or simply pass the communication to all the teachers to see if any of them wants to join the activity. Typically, two or more teachers decide to participate together, in order to share the tasks and the hours needed to perform them. The HOC-LAB staff provides participants with a short guide on how to make a multimedia narrative: the guide is approximately 12 pages long and it addresses both communication (how to select a proper topic, how to organise the content…) and technological issues (how to record MP3 files, how to use the 1001 stories toolkit). As we said above, the technological requirements for using the toolkit are very low, so that almost any teacher can take part: their pedagogical knowledge is much more necessary than their technical knowledge to successfully complete the experience (Di Blas et al., 2010c; Mishra and Koehler, 2006). When the work is completed, participants can decide whether to take part in the national competition. If they are nominated among the finalists, they come to the celebration day at the LABs premises in Milan, in June. Both teachers and pupils are invited: workshops (for the pupils) and focus groups (for the teachers) are organised, in order to allow the LABs researchers investigating the impact of the toolkit with its direct users.

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3.4 Production workflow In the light of our experience with professional applications (Di Blas et al., 2010a), we sketched a production workflow composed of five main steps: 1

theme selection

2

editorial plan creation, i.e., deciding what the topics and sub-topics are

3

gathering of the material

4

content’s refinement

5

data upload.

But in spite of this, teachers and pupils interpret these rules quite freely and a number of very creative organisational patterns are possible (Di Blas et al., 2009b). For example, in some cases the topic of the narrative is the object of some other school activity, independent from PoliCultura, therefore a huge amount of material is already there and the need is to ‘squeeze’ it into the 1001 stories format. In other cases, since the class is divided into groups, the workflow runs in parallel: each group manages the collection-refinement-data upload sequence independently. In the first year of deployment, when high schools only were addressed, two kinds of topics for the narrative were suggested: local art or local history. We then understood that this constraint hindered teachers from participating, since they felt they could not afford abandoning curricular activities to focus on specific topics. We therefore decided to let them free to select whatever subject they wanted. Pupils are typically organised into groups. The groups’ composition is either decided by the teacher (who for example puts together proficient with less proficient pupils) or by the pupils themselves. Inside the group, roles may alternate so that all the pupils can perform all kinds of activities: writing the texts, drawing the pictures and scanning them, recording the audios, managing the activities as ‘project managers’, etc. As an alternative, teachers give a different role to each pupil in the class (like for example ‘the reporter’) and all the students work cooperatively. The teacher’s role varies according to the kids’ age: for very young kids (less than eight years old), she manages the activity; for older kids, she gives them freedom, often delegating most of the technology-based activities to them. In all cases, she acts as supervisor of the production process. At any time, during the creation process, authors can preview and play the final result. When authoring is completed, the generation engine delivers the narrative as a website, an off-line version (CD-ROMs can be burnt for the families) and also podcast. All the narratives are displayed on our website (http://www.policultura.it), but schools are free to install them on their server if they wish. In many cases, in order to share the results with the families, schools have printed the work in various formats (e.g., notebook, posters…).

3.5 Monitoring tools Every year, from 2006, the impact of the activity has been tested through a number of means: online questionnaires, direct interviews (via Skype and telephone), focus groups during the celebration days and the analysis of the students’ artefacts. Online questionnaires are administered to:

Digital storytelling at school 1

teachers who complete the narrative and take part in the competition

2

teachers who complete the narrative but do not take part in the competition

3

teachers who do not complete the narrative and therefore do not take part in the competition.

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Questions mainly revolve around their assessment of the benefits achieved by the students and how the activity was implemented. Interviews are taken when the activity is about to start, to investigate the teachers’ expectations, and at the end of the activity, to investigate the results. Interviews undergo a complex refinement process that go from the transcription to a more synthetic main features’ extraction. The ultimate goal is to put all the features’ extraction documents in a repository, to be explored thanks to a combination of faceted search and tags/words clouds. The repository is one of the tasks of a national-funded project, Learning 4All, that involves partners from both technological and pedagogical universities. It is foreseen to host hundreds of documents (each corresponding to a single interview) resulting also from other ICT-based experiences, thus providing a comprehensive overview of how ICT can be used in school environments and with what results. The repository’s target are both teachers and scholars (Paolini et al., 2011). Focus groups are held each year during the celebration day of PoliCultura: HOC-LAB researchers sit together at a round table with 20 to 30 teachers and school principals. Issues dealt with are: why did you decide to join an ICT-based activity? What kind of benefits did it bring about? How did you organise the class? Did you manage to involve all the students? Were ICT somehow helpful for inclusion? Eventually, the narratives themselves are object of analysis by a panel of experts. The quality of the results is an indicator of how much media literacy has been achieved.

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Educational benefits

The digital storytelling activity of PoliCultura generates a number of substantial educational benefits. Actually, numerous studies have shown that the learning outcomes achieved by students constructing external representations of their knowledge are stronger, retained longer, and transferred to other relevant contexts (Lajoie and Derry, 2000; Lehrer, 1993). This is also supported by several constructivist theories, such as constructionism (Papert, 1980), collaborative learning (Slavin, 1995), situated cognition (Brown et al., 1989) and authentic learning (Herrington, 2006). In this section, we present the results of the data collected with 139 teachers during school-year 2009 to 2010 [results from previous years are comparable – see also Di Blas et al. (2008, 2009b)]. First of all, we present the data related to what we may call ‘direct’ (i.e., curricular, typical, expectable…) benefits, then we move to the core of this paper: the achievement of ‘indirect’ (non-curricular, atypical, unpredictable…) benefits. The reader must note that rating is on a 1 to 5 points scale, where 1 is the most negative score while 5 is the best and 3 average.

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4.1 Direct benefits Teachers acknowledge that the storytelling activity with 1001 stories fosters substantial cognitive benefits, in terms of enhanced curiosity (score: 4), improved knowledge (score: 3.86) and improved recollection (score: 3.69), all in relation to the narrative’s topic. In addition, 67.7% of the teachers declare that their pupils show increased curiosity towards their subject of teaching (e.g., history, history of art, mathematics …). Communication skills are enhanced too, both in general (score: 3.76) and more specifically with new technologies (the so-called media literacy; score: 3.92). Related to this, the pupils’ capacity of well organising content is also acknowledged (score: 3.73). The acquisition of technical skills is obviously also there (score: 3.81), although it scores less than most of the cognitive benefits (see Figure 4). Interviews actually show a switch between the expectations of the interviewees that consider the acquisition of technological skills as prominent, and the results, where other benefits emerge as more relevant, first and foremost the improved capacity to communicate with new technologies. The so-called social skills are also perceived as very relevant, the capacity of working in group especially. Figure 4 The educational benefits of PoliCultura (see online version for colours)

Note: Year 2009 to 2010, 139 respondents.

Last but not least, teachers report a significant increase in students’ engagement and motivation. While engagement can be defined as the sheer pleasure of participating/doing an activity, motivation is the will of performing the required tasks (i.e., reading, researching, making the drawings, etc.), the feeling that expanding a great deal of energy into something is worthwhile (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). 68.3% of the teachers declare that the class as a whole had been involved; 27% of the teachers declare that 80% of the pupils in the class had been involved. Teachers report: “PoliCultura has triggered aggregation inside the class; students were so motivated that they worked even in extra-curricular hours”; “PoliCultura generates enthusiasm: pupils show prolonged attention and they thrive to improve their performance”. Engagement and motivation are probably the driving forces for all the other benefits.

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4.2 Indirect benefits Together with the curricular benefits, a number of other benefits are generated that are atypical in school environment. •

Professional attitude: Probably in relation to the group work and also to the competition, students develop a sense of responsibility and an almost ‘professional’ attitude. They feel that their contribution is intertwined with those of their peers and is crucial for the overall final result (finishing the narrative and winning the competition). A teacher reports: “all the kids seem much more responsible. They know that their work is crucial for the whole class. They start to understand what a deadline is!”.



Surfacing of new talents: Since the activity is unusual, it reconfigures the relationships inside the class as some students’ abilities that are usually not rewarded in normal school’s activities, surface as relevant (typically, the technological skills).



Improved relationships between teacher and students: The common goal of creating a good product and hopefully winning the competition bonds not only the students as a group but also the students and the teacher. A teacher reports: “PoliCultura has been an occasion to know my students better, especially some kids who proved invaluable in this work, whereas in regular school activity they do not usually stand out”.



Increased motivation towards school’s activities: The motivation generated by the ICT-based experience lasts more than the experience itself and influences other school activities. For example, a teacher reports: “The students in my school (an Economics-Technical Institute) seem uninterested in learning the techniques of writing, and disaffected about culture in general. The teachers’ job gets harder, as we struggle to find strategies for motivating students to express their thoughts in correct forms. The opportunity offered by PoliCultura, that made available to schools such a friendly product of advanced technology to communicate culture, was well accepted: all students in the class could collaborate to create the interactive narrative. Educational results have been excellent, because writing – together with other forms of expression – has become a useful tool, which students use now with increased confidence”.



Families’ participation: Again thanks to the high level of involvement, students tend to report on what they are doing at home. In one case, the students of a primary school who had done a narrative about the local archaeological museum, after the work was finished brought their parents to visit the museum, acting as ‘guides’. Most of the families had never visited the museum before (Garzotto and Paolini, 2008). In another case, the grand-father of one of the kids was involved in the activity as ‘historical memory’: the topic was the old way of living in a small village in the Italian Alps.



Community-at-large involvement: Sometimes, involvement crosses the boundaries of the school’s walls to reach the community at large. For example, a beautiful narrative produced by a pre-school class was presented in the local theatre to the school’s principal, the town’s major and all the people who wished to attend.

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Help into expressing oneself: Asking children to tell a story with their own ‘digital’ words, for example interpreting a character or simply reporting a personal experience, helps them to express their inner self, sometimes in problematic situations. A young primary school girl who took part to PoliCultura while in hospital (a small, ever-changing class had been organised there) found a way to ‘speak aloud’ about her difficult situation. Asked to re-interpret in her own words the wizard of Oz tale, she reported that “our nurse is just like the Witch of the North: she can see everything. Yesterday she spotted me while eating a cookie and she scolded me: you know you just can’t have cookies she said…”. In another case, students were asked to make a self-presentation using poetry and images, with the 1001stories tool. Andrea, a primary school boy, described himself as a ‘chips’: “If I were a chips, I would crumble up immediately, for I’m so scared of being crunched…” (…) “but if I were Andrea, as I am and always have been, I would be a very long book to read”.



Inclusion: The general excitement produced by PoliCultura urges all the students to take part, even students with disabilities or diverse needs. A teacher reports: “In my class there is a dyslexic kid. He tried to record his part some 15, 20 times. He did not want to give up! The whole class stood around him cheering and in the end, he made it”.

5

The ‘key ingredients’ of the experience

In this paragraph, we attempt to extrapolate from our experience what the ‘key ingredients’ that make it successful are. Figure 5 summarises our view. Figure 5 Key ingredients of digital storytelling in schools, their immediate effects and generated benefits (see online version for colours)

Note: The elements marked with * are those controlled (totally or partially) by the designer.

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PoliCultura, as we discussed above, generates a number of benefits: direct (i.e., ‘traditional’, related to the curriculum, typical of a school environment…) and indirect (a-typical, non-foreseen, not even looked-for but still relevant). The main driving forces in our opinion are: 1

motivation (meant as the willingness to make an effort for achieving something)

2

the ‘reshuffling of roles’ that the activity triggers.

Ease of use is the necessary pre-condition that allows the activity to be performed in any kind school and by any teacher, even with a poor technological background. 1001 stories can be managed very easily: 20 minutes is the average learning time in primary school. Serious content is essential for the achievement of substantial benefits in terms of knowledge (one of the direct benefits). Though this point may sound obvious, we want to stress that phantasmagoric technological effects are useless if serious content is not there. The second thing to be noted is that learning does not come through technology per se but thanks to the motivation generated by technology: as discussed elsewhere, technology acts as trigger, like an ‘exciting shopping experience’ thanks to which goods (i.e., sound, traditional, deep learning) are bought (Di Blas et al., 2010c). Motivation comes from/together with engagement and engagement in its turn comes from the fact that kids are using ICT. Data from interviews and focus groups show that teachers acknowledge the fundamental role of technology in motivating their pupils. When explicitly asked whether a similar activity but without ICT would have worked the same, they all (100%) said it would not. A comparative study, where storytelling with 1001stories and without it was performed, reinforce this conclusion (Rubegni and Paolini, 2010). Still, ICT alone is not enough: we offer all participants the possibility of using the 1001 stories tool for any other activity they wish, but just a negligible subset actually does it (less than 1%). Actually, the second key ingredient for motivating students is a clear goal to achieve, in our case delivering the work by the deadline and hopefully winning the competition. Previous experiences with ICT-based programmes in schools demonstrated that the competition acts as a powerful spur for doing one’s best (Di Blas et al., 2009a). Being goal-directed is one of the many characteristics that in Csikszentmihalyi’s option an activity should have in order to foster a sense of flow (i.e., deep involvement) in the participants (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).The third motivating factor is the visibility of the results: students (and their families) are fluttered by the fact that their work will be on the web, visible to everyone. In another sense, even very young kids (pre-school) like to think that someone (the ‘people in Milan’, their families, their relatives…) will look at what they have done (Figure 6). Interviews to teachers reveal that an additional motivating factor is the relevance of Politecnico in the Italian panorama: especially schools from small rural towns like to think they are taking part in a national big initiative promoted by a prestigious institution.

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Figure 6 Pre-school kids have just uploaded a set of picture and patiently wait while the system is loading (see online version for colours)

Collaboration fosters both motivation and the reshuffling of roles. The interesting thing is that the 1001 stories tool is not meant for collaborative use (but at the same time it does allow for it). Still, when introduced in the classroom, it does foster a collaborative activity (Di Blas et al., 2010b) and therefore strengthens the bonds among the students, who need to cooperate to reach a common end. A teacher reports: “my students are reaching the awareness that group work means coordinating, listening to each other, dividing tasks etc.” A high-school student reports: “the entire activity was almost entirely managed by us students: we split into groups, collected relevant information and then worked on it. Although the groups were 6, all collaborated with each other all the time”. The fact that 1001stories although not meant to foster collaboration does allow it has turned out as an unexpected asset: interviews reveal that 100% of the participants do work in group, in one way or another. The reshuffling of roles is determined by the necessity for the teachers to adopt a new pedagogical paradigm: teachers are provided, from our side, with just a sketch of instructional design that needs to be completed and adapted in full details to fit the needs of their specific situations. A number of factors are to be taken into account, ranging from the students’ characteristics (proficiency, inclinations, capabilities, diverse needs…) to the equipment availability and the colleagues’ (or the principal’s) willingness to support the activity. In addition, most of the times the activity is fully new for both teachers and students. Unlike normal school activities, the teacher is neither fully aware of the details nor can s/he fully handle the technological tasks. S/he has to cooperate with the students to face the novelty. It oftentimes happens that students who for example are good at using technology become the teachers’ ‘helpers’. Thus, roles in the class are reshuffled and there is a chance for new talents to emerge and gain, through a successful experience, enough confidence and motivation to perform better in school activities in general. A teacher reported in an interview this interesting anecdote: “In my class there is a student that, well, you know – makes you desperate. I gave the class as homework to prepare a

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slideshow for the narrative. I asked them to deliver it by e-mail. Three hours later I got the slideshow from that boy (the disaffected one). I could not believe it. The day after, I showed it to all my colleagues who were as surprised as I was. From that moment, I gave him more responsibility in the activity”. Let us now transform the lessons learned in a set of guidelines for designers: 1

The tool must be easy to use (to allow for wide adoption and also to support communication efficiently). We deliberately sacrificed some advanced functionalities (that we do have in our professional version) to make the tool as intuitive and usable as possible.

2

Be sure to deal with sound, serious content. It is easy to run experiences with ICT generating high engagement that seems positive but do not produce a substantial educational impact.

3

Provide participants with a clear goal. Studies and data demonstrate that having a clear goal is a powerful motivating factor for participants. As we said above: while hundreds of classes use our tool every year for taking part in the competition, less than 1% use it for other educational activities.

4

Provide some sort of visibility to the results of the activity. For example, publishing works on the web is again a good motivator.

5

Encourage/allow collaboration among participants. 1001 stories had not been meant for a collaborative use; yet, 100% of the participants did work in group and this turned out as one of the greatest assets of the experience, according to teachers. Our advice is therefore: do promote collaboration! …or, at least, do not impede it.

6

Do not ‘encage’ participants (and most important their leader, the teacher), in a strict instructional design; let them free to add, adapt, change the rules to fit their situation and needs. This is where creativity works.

6

Conclusions

In Section 5, we have distilled what we deem are the key ingredients of our successful educational experience with digital storytelling in schools. In our current research, we want to better investigate the ‘instructional design’ – how the experience is implemented in the class. As we said above, in spite of the fact that we suggest a workflow of activities in the instructions we provide participants with, they tend to interpret them in many different ways and… do as they like. Through the interviews (and their refinement) performed in the frame of the Learning4All project, we are trying to elicit how the implementation process relates to the achieved benefits. We know that the secret of a positive educational impact lies in the process of creation itself, independently from the quality of the result.

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Acknowledgements We warmly thank first and foremost Paolo Paolini, Scientific Coordinator of HOC-LAB and of PoliCultura. We also like to thank the people from the HOC-LAB staff who passionately work for making PoliCultura a success every year, especially Elena Maccari, PoliCultura’s project manager. This work is partially supported by National Project L4A (‘Learning for All’) Grant No. RBNE07CPX 001.

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