Janey's Upper Elementary Grades-Cognitive and Behavioral Disabilities Classroom:

Producing iMovie Autobiographies

Janey had six students ranging in age from 9 to 12. All boys, they had both moderate cognitive delays and behavioral problems. Most were easily distracted and required a great deal of individual attention to complete tasks. All had difficulty with word recognition and reading comprehension, as well as in expressing their ideas orally and in writing. Setting high expectations, Janey’s motto was, "I have never met a child who I could not teach."

At a STAR Cycle team meeting, Janey became intrigued when another colleague described how he was using iMovie with his fourth grade students to produce lively autobiographies that combined text, music, and pictures. Janey became interested in doing something similar with her students to meet her district’s ELA standards for language, literature, and composition. She reasoned that the technology could motivate students to persevere through the writing, revising, publishing, and viewing process. Past experience revealed that her students exhibited an aptitude for using high-technology tools, such as Microsoft Word, Excel, Inspiration, and TimeLiner. They were also familiar with the concepts of biography and autobiography, having read and written in these genres.

Janey decided to implement her autobiography pilot unit at the end of the school year as the final project. Using iMovie, the students would create autobiographies using photos of events, people, and places; stories related to the pictures; and a musical score.

Planning the Unit

Planning involved identifying curriculum goals, learning how to use iMovie, identifying instructional phases, and identifying technology tools to support learning. Janey identified three curriculum goals drawn from the standards:

• Write compositions with a clear focus, logical relationships, ideas to develop, and adequate detail.
  
  
• Demonstrate improvement in organization, content, paragraph development, level of detail, style, and word choice in compositions after revising them.
  
  
• Use knowledge of Standard English conventions to edit writing.

We helped Janey review the basic steps for using the iMovie program:

• Scanning photos and saving them onto a file on the server
  
  
• Taking digital pictures and saving them onto the server
  
  
• Creating electronic files of the students' stories using Microsoft Word
  
  
• Making a cover (or introductory screen) for the project in Kid Pix, and saving the file as a jpeg

Janey decided that the unit would have three phases. In Phase I, devoted to data collection, the students would take photos, bring in pictures they already had at home, and start generating ideas and drafts for the stories they wanted to include in their movies. In Phase II, they would shift to analyzing and synthesizing the information. Film would be developed, pictures organized, and drafts revised and edited. Once the drafts were completed, the students would type the finished pieces on the Macs in Janey’s classroom. Phase III would involve production, digitizing photos, finishing inputting stories, and creating movies.

The chart below summarizes the strategies and low-, mid-, and high-tech tools tools Janey planned to use.

Implementing the Unit

Although the unit was divided into three phases, the division between the phases was fluid. Since Janey wanted her students to be able to work at their own pace, she encouraged students to move on to the next phase in the process as soon as they were ready to do so.

Phase I: Data Collection

In Phase I, the students had to identify the major events of their lives, select three events to focus on in the movie, and begin to take and gather pictures. Janey began the unit by reviewing with her students the biographies and autobiographies they had read in the past. She would name a person and draw on her students’ prior knowledge of the major events in that person’s life. Gradually, Janey made the transition to her students' lives, asking them to recall a major event in the distant or recent past.

As a follow-up to the discussion, Janey gave each student a modified timeline—a graphic organizer with two rows of boxes laid out in landscape view. Graphic organizers were a no-tech strategy that both she and her students were comfortable with. She had them write an event in each box in sequential order . Then she met individually with each of them to discuss the events and select three important events for the movie. For example, Herbie chose going to the Six Flags amusement park when he was three, caring for his pet cat and python snake, and a trip to Pennsylvania to celebrate Thanksgiving with his family (building on a writing assignment from the past November).

The next step was beginning to draft their stories. Janey liked having her students’ draft with paper and pencil before using the word processor for revising and editing. The first day of drafting was devoted to framing the autobiography by writing an introduction to capture the reader’s interest. Here is Eddie’s lead:

Once upon a time there was a beautiful woman named Maria who adopted a son named Eddie. Eddie lives with his mother, sister, brother, and nephew in Hyde Park. Eddie has had many adventures in his life and hopes to have many more. Read on to learn more about Eddie’s life.

On three subsequent days, the students wrote about each important event. While they worked on these drafts, Janey conferenced with each of them to provide support. Janey’s strategy was to have the student read the piece out loud and then ask him questions about the writing. The questions ranged from basic mechanics to specific content. For example, she might ask a student how he could expand on an idea by asking him several questions like, "What color is the dog?" or "How did you feel when that happened to you?"

Janey adjusted the support strategies she used based on each student’s needs. For example, she noted that Jonathan did not hit the space bar to insert spaces between words when he used the word processor. To help him know where to put a space, Janey had him go over a handwritten draft and use a stamp between each word. The stamp was a little smiley face. When he was typing and he saw the stamp, he knew to hit the space bar.

The other part of the data collection involved gathering photographs. Janey provided the students with disposable cameras so that they could take pictures of their families, friends, pets, and anything else important in their lives. The students were allowed to take the cameras home. Parents had already been alerted via a letter sent to them before the unit started. When Janey collected the used cameras from the students, she took the film in for developing.

Janey borrowed our digital camera, and the students took pictures of each other in the classroom. Heather helped students save the images onto the server by connecting a cable from the camera to the computer.

Phase II: Data Analysis and Synthesis

Although Janey served as a scribe to help students with their first drafts, the students inputted the text into a word processor themselves. Janey felt strongly that her students could do this kind of work without assistance, even if it took them a long time to do the typing. For example, Herbie had mastered the skill of copying and pasting text within a Microsoft Word document after being shown just once.

Janey used different strategies to help her students during this phase. For example, she took advantage of the digital sticky notes that came with the Mac. Using virtual sticky notes expanded on Janey’s frequent use of paper sticky notes for instructional purposes. At the end of the school day when she reviewed the typed drafts, she used the virtual sticky notes to make comments (see image—left). Then, the next day when the student booted up the computer, the notes would be waiting on the computer’s desktop. The notes might be about what to do next, a question, or a suggestion to improve the writing.

During this phase, students scanned pictures they had brought from home and the ones they had taken with the disposable camera. Most of the students did this with adult supervision, although Herbie did the most on his own. He learned to use the adjustment tools in the scanning program to correct the lighting in the image and crop his photos.

The students also started making covers for their books using the drawing, painting, and text features of the software program Kid Pix. They could work independently on this step because they were already familiar with Kid Pix.

Phase III: Production

The students were now ready to begin using iMovie to create their movies. They learned how to open the program and import their images. After several tries, one student said, "I don’t need your help anymore. I know how to do it. Let me do it." They also learned how to copy and paste the text from a typed story into iMovie. Other steps involved creating a title, finding an ending for the movie, and adding transitions.

The students were allowed to choose whether they would retype their stories or cut and paste them from their Microsoft Word files. The text for each image clip had to be entered separately. To add the text, the students would click on a clip in the timeline and then hit the "Title" button. Students worked with an adult to decide how much text to put on each clip. iMovie would play a clip with text for about eight seconds only. Each student would decide what he wanted each clip to say. Then, working with an adult, the student would hit "Preview" to play the clip and see if he could read the amount of text on the clip before it faded from the screen. He would modify the length of the line of text, if needed.

As a next step, students learned how to import the music track using the audio feature in the iMovie interface. Students listened to several CDs from the classroom library and selected music that was compatible with their movies. Once the track was imported, students learned how to shorten it so that it ran exactly the length of the movie. Once the music was added, the movies were complete. When all the movies were done it was time to transfer them from the computers onto VHS tape using the Dazzle Digital Bridge.

Reflecting on the Unit

After the unit ended Janey identified four lessons she had learned. First, she said that she had strengthened her understanding of task analysis. "For particular students, I might need to take many steps back to help them develop a prerequisite skill before I could help them go forward in their learning." For example, Janey found that she had made some false assumptions about what Jonathan knew about including spaces between words when writing. She realized that when Jonathan’s words ran together, it was not just an eye-hand coordination or motor problem. Rather, he did not fully understand that written words need to be separated. When she showed him that he could put a stamp of a happy face between each word, the physical act of doing that seemed to click for him. Later, when he went to the computer to input his story, he relied on the stamp as a signal indicating that he should hit the space bar. The strategy had helped him make a connection between the stamp and the space bar. His documents, with spaces between words, were now readable.

Second, Janey found value in using the computerized version of sticky notes with her students. When a student booted up his computer, he would often find one of the notes on the screen with a succinct message, e.g., reminding him what to do next or offering him words of encouragement. The personalized prompts motivated them to work hard.

Third, Janey reflected on the importance of involving parents. Their participation exceeded her expectations.

The fourth lesson learned was that some technology tools are worth the time and effort and some are not. For example, part of the original plan was to have students take new pictures, bring in old family photos of major life events, and then scan the pictures into the computer. It took a great deal of time for them to scan all the pictures. Janey realized it would have been much better to have the new pictures put on a disk when they were developed. The students could have scanned a few of the older photos for the experience, but Janey, Amy, or Heather could have worked quickly on their own to scan the bulk of the older ones. This way, Amy and Heather could have spent much more of their time with the students helping them with their writing—a more important goal than doing the mechanical work of scanning pictures during class time. For her future units, Janey planned to start with less time-consuming activities and spend her time and energy on what was truly important for the students’ learning.

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