Fostering Creativity Through Digital Media Projects

Purpose & objective

This session will demonstrate how we have successfully integrated digital media creation into our elementary curriculum. Students are harnessing their creativity to record podcasts, produce green screen videos, create stop-motion videos, and develop other digital media products to display their learning in various subject areas. Our students are utilizing iPads, Chromebooks, and iMacs to create content with Audacity, Garageband, DoInk, Stop Motion apps, Swivl, YouTube, and more.

Students have embraced this method of showcasing their learning progressions as it has added an engaging and authentic method that may be used as an effective assessment tool. Several projects will be displayed along with the rubrics and set up needed to guide the students in their production process.

Participants will be able to explore the digital media tools first-hand in our session. Participants will also leave the session with a variety of resources and ideas to begin the implementation process of adding digital media creation to their existing district-wide curriculum.

Student engagement and content knowledge has increased dramatically through the use of digital media as they are able to use their creativity to show their content knowledge in different subject areas. The use of digital media has increased mastery of learning outcomes as students create authentic content in comparison to the use of traditional assessment tools. Students are excited about showing their learning, which has led to greater leaps in student achievement. Our data will be presented to support our findings.

Outline

We will spend 45 minutes presenting how we began the implementation process of adding digital medial production to our curriculum. This will include the professional development that we went through as teachers, how we presented digital media production to our students, a look into the tools and resources students use to create, and the projects that resulted from this addition to the curriculum.

We will allow time at the end of the session for questions, audience discussion, and the opportunity for attendees to get their hands-on some of the tools that students use to create their digital media projects.

We will use a backchannel chat to facilitate an ongoing discussion throughout the presentation that we will monitor. As questions and topics arise, we will address them as we present. This will allow for attendees to participate and we will be able to seamlessly integrate their questions and answers into our presentation. Attendees will also be encouraged to share their own digital media production experiences in the chat to allow us all to see this topic from various perspectives.

Supporting research

Friesem, Yonty. (2019). Media Production in Elementary Education. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332991464_Media_Production_in_Elementary_Education

How to Integrate Green Screens into Any Classroom: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-10-19-how-to-integrate-green-screens-into-any-classroom

Project Audio: Teaching Students How to Produce Their Own Podcasts: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/learning/lesson-plans/project-audio-teaching-students-how-to-produce-their-own-podcasts.html