Can the use of digital video technology help children develop narrative dialogues in short stories?

Simon Elliott

July 2005

Table of Contents

Introduction3

Context of the study5

Literature review6

Introduction6

What is narrative?9

Multimedia in education11

New literacies        15

Digital video        21

Research methodology25

Presentation of the evidence29

Analysis of child and teacher questionnaires29

Marking criteria and marker’s comments31

Interviews with children32

Experiences whilst conducting the research34

Quantitative analysis of story assessment data36

Qualitative analysis of other evidence40

Conclusions41

List of References45

Bibliography50

Appendix:  Student and staff ICT survey51

Introduction

Digital Video (DV) is an exciting, and relatively new technology that allows the user to manipulate a filmed event to produce quality artefacts in a short space of time.  The advent of cheap computers with the necessary software and hardware built in has given schools the opportunity to make use of technology in new and exciting ways.

DV offers a relatively simple way to use technology out of the familiar setting of the ICT laboratory, especially with the availability of mobile computers with DV editing capabilities.  What I aimed to achieve in this study was to attempt to provide a view of whether the visual media provides an effective method of enabling children to produce better work in traditionally textual areas and, as a result, empower teachers to use ICT within their subject area.  As video is primarily a narrative medium, I concentrated on the English Language curriculum for the practical part of the study, with children using the tool to aid in the production of a short story through recording of group improvisation, transcription of the resulting video and word-processing to edit the final story.

This report is split into a number of distinct sections.  Firstly, I looked at the evidence behind the use of Digital Video (DV) and other Multimedia technologies in the classroom and how they have been shown to assist in the development of literacy.  Secondly it looks at a study of the use of DV in the classroom in a specific context, the short story.  Children’s and teachers’ confidence and experience in the use of ICT and new media were also assessed through questionnaires and are summarised in the context of the findings. Thirdly it tries to suggest, through my experiences from before and during the study, ways that DV can be successfully integrated into the curriculum.  To this end the report also refers to other research being carried out in this new and emerging field.

The group chosen for the action research were all used to using computer technology for more mundane tasks – word processing, spreadsheets, etc. – but had never used Digital Video in the classroom context.  I was also interested to see whether the use of technology in this way could be subject to the sort of gender differences in the children’s experience of technology at home that Gray (1992) comments on in relation to the use of technology in the home.  This would be analysed by referring to gender when the story scores had been collated.

Context of the Study

The study was carried out in a small, non-selective, charity-based independent school in the West of Cornwall.  The group was from Year 9 and had completed Key Stage 3 ICT in Year 8 (The school operates an accelerated curriculum for Key Stage 2 to give the advantage of an extra year for GCSE).  The class were mixed ability and consisted of twenty one children of a roughly equal gender split (10 boys and 11 girls) with three “English as an Additional Language” children and four receiving support for dyslexia.

The research was carried out over the last half of the Spring Term and the material collated over the Summer Term of the academic year 2001-2002.  The analysis of data took place over the Autumn Term of the year 2002-2003.  Writing-up took place in the Spring Term of 2003.

I was a Chemistry teacher in an all-girls’ maintained comprehensive in Southampton before moving into ICT, initially through an LEA support team and latterly as Director of ICT in the school where the research was carried out.

The teacher responsible for assessing the quality of the stories was an experienced English teacher who took the group for GCSE English and was familiar with their abilities.  This teacher was unaware of which children had used video and which had not and would therefore be marking the stories’ quality uninfluenced by their production method.  They were also unaware of the proportion using video.

The school has made great advances in the use of ICT.  However, as was noted in an Ofsted inspection, cross-curricular ICT is still not fully embedded in the curriculum.  It was therefore necessary to look to research and identify a new and exciting way to entice reluctant teachers into allowing ICT to transform their subject area.

Literature Review

Introduction

It has become apparent to me that my teaching style has had to change to meet the needs of children growing up in an evermore computer-focused environment.  Worksheets have given way to overhead transparencies, PowerPoint now yields to web design and the use of Digital Video.

Research done over several years by McMahon et al. (1999) showed that the biggest obstacle for children to overcome in order to effectively use computers were that the different subject areas assumed that someone else would teach them how to use the computer tools.  What’s more, McMahon et al (1999) commented that they felt that resources focused on a given subject were inadequate or that staff knew even less than the children.  As a result of reading this and other sources, I became interested in whether Digital Video could be a simple way to introduce new technologies into classrooms outside of the ICT curriculum.

Richardson (2002:15) says that:

“To a much greater deal than before, tools not only help learners engage with the subject but also develop their ICT capability which includes the underlying concepts of how to identify, retrieve, assimilate, interpret and communicate relevant information”

What then, are these tools and how can they be used to change learners’ experiences with particular reference to storytelling?

Hung and Chen (2001) tell us that story writing is an area of learning that offers the opportunity for children to create artefacts at their own level (rather than more formalised learning that might take place in a subject such as Maths or Science) and thus, following the Vygotskian principles of the “Zone of Proximal Development”, we can see that the use of visual and auditory cues for developing the storyline access higher mental functions, especially when focused around a social or cultural context, such as the storylines that would be used by the children in this study.

Rogoff (1990:41) defines the Zone of Proximal Development as:

“Child development is viewed as a social activity with children participating in activities beyond their competence through the assistance of more experienced peers”

It could be suggested that the social activity of collaborating to bring one of their peer’s storyboards to life freshens the focus on dialogue in children’s minds and then, as they transcribe the story, they are able to learn about the development of a dialogue through listening to their peers.

Whilst I felt that story-writing would be an ideal activity in which to use the technology of DV to enhance, it became clear that the use of ICT in the teaching of literacy in general was weak, both from reading the recent and current literature cited in this essay and from observing the use of ICT in the schools that I have worked in.

In a survey carried out by Findlay (2001) in 1998 of 230 schools, none connected the use of ICT with Literacy.  Two years later, only 17% described their use of ICT in developing reading and writing skills as “consistent”.  This shows an area of weakness that I feel might appear somewhat strange to someone from the world of literature or publishing.

When Findlay (2001) looked at Literacy teaching in 24 contexts, it was found that teachers resorted to very traditional teaching methods.

The conclusions of Findlay’s study included a statement reinforcing the need for new pedagogies to support the use of ICT rather than merely tacking it on to existing strategies.  Again we have this idea of a new revolution in teaching and learning waiting to be initiated by educators yet happening in the everyday lives of our new-media children.

The work of Findlay is further backed up by Harrison (2002) in the ImpaCT2 report where the researchers report that:

“ICT is little used in English at KS4.  The majority of pupils surveyed reported never or hardly ever using ICT to support their learning of English, either within the their English lessons (71%) or within their wider school experiences (72%).  This contrasts with the finding that approximately half the sample used ICT at home to support their English studies, with one third reporting use some weeks and 20% most weeks or every week.”

We therefore see that, even in one of the most recent and wide-ranging pieces of research into the use of ICT in schools that took place after several years of high national investment in ICT equipment, children’s home use of ICT was far more embedded than their use in school and this use was not guided by teachers – the children were teaching themselves.

What is narrative?

Salisbury (2000) quotes Burton as saying that good narrative must connect with the audience.  Sometimes this is most effectively done with actors understanding their characters and scene, then improvising the narrative – bringing self-expression into the dialogue.  If this can be captured for the story (textually), real conversational style can then be successfully duplicated.

Salisbury (2000:48) then says that Burton goes on to define “Narrative Structure” as “The ability to tell a story coherently”.  Abbs and Richardson (1999:189) call narrative “a connected series of events” and King and King (2001:108) call it “A piece of prose that tells a story”.

The common factor in the above sources that would point to a definition of quality narrative is the flow or continuity of the language.

When we look at narrative in dialogue, Abbs and Richardson (1999:86) say that:

“You only have to listen to five minutes of real-life dialogue to realise that normal conversation would be unbearably tedious in a novel”

Whilst the group under study would be creating a short story and not a novel, the concept (1999:87) of “pruning” the recorded speech would be important.  Without direct instruction, would they realise the necessity of this when transcribing the DV recordings and avoid creating boring stories?

Croft and Cross (1997:97) tell us that a short story should be clear in a number of ways:

“The plot and structure should be clear and easy to understand;

The narrative viewpoint should allow the reader to be clear about who is telling the story;

The characters should be well developed and refer to each other effectively;

The language and style should be consistent, whether written quite plainly using little figurative language or using imagery to create the desired effect.”

It might seem obvious but the story should also have a clear beginning, middle and end (even if it is a cliff-hanger).  Croft and Cross (1997:96) make many of these ideas clear in their chapter on the short story.

Peet and Richardson (1992:269) argue that:

“Language is constructed by society prior to an individual acquiring it.  The individual cannot think outside of their own experience”

One possible conclusion that we could draw from this is that, when developing written language (the dialogue), and watching and listening to others converse, the author might gain a deeper understanding than his or her experience might normally allow and thus create a more interesting dialogue.

Once the nature of a quality narrative is understood, we must move on to looking at how new technologies have caused language to develop.

Multimedia in education

As long ago as 1964, visionaries, such as McLuhan, were foretelling the effects that our new-media saturated lives would have on the world around us.  McLuhan (1964:44) argues that the new visual media captures the attention of the viewer.  It could be suggested from this that children who view themselves in film will naturally pay more attention to the dialogue.

McLuhan (1964:63) notes that children who suffer from a learning difficulty improve when communicating through another medium.  Even though McLuhan was not referring to DV or any other modern Information Technology, could we extrapolate the concept to the use of DV and question whether it too could free those with textual difficulties suggesting that it allows them to escape their own limitations?

Cowley (2002) notes the use of video-creating in engaging children with the intended audience.  Cowley then goes on to warn us with the comment that: (2002:104)

“There is much more to writing interesting and exciting dialogue than simply transferring speech onto the page”

If we accept Cowley’s view, we should be cautious when allowing students to transcribe conversation from improvised dialogues.

Andrews (2000) develops the ideas of teaching and learning in the new-media age by arguing that visual and verbal (text) must be dealt with alongside each other in the classroom.  These ideas are taken further when we look at the path already taken in media:  Early use of multimedia was what would now be commonplace with a program such as Microsoft’s PowerPoint.  Andrews (2000:26) tells us that:

“We must go beyond this if we are to meet children where they are.  Many families routinely use video to tell the story of their lives.  Could we not do the same in the classroom setting?”

Baines (1999:167) states that, when responding to new technologies, the following considerations must be made:

1.Getting, using and presenting information.

2.Being part of a learning world.

3.Communicating.

4.Learning through ICT-based services.

5.Using Cyberservices.

6.Using technology to do new things.

7.Having Fun.

Of all of the above, communicating is a natural process that, for most of us,  takes little encouraging (just think of how children use SMS Text and Instant Messenging).

Lachs (2000:7) describes clearly how media allows children to express their ideas often in non-linear ways that could not be achieved through conventional storytelling.  By allowing them to become “Knowledge Builders”, and placing the focus on the audience, children develop more effective narrative as they think about the telling of the story rather than just the story itself.

Later in the book, Lachs goes on to describe the use of non-textual media (video and animation) for allowing children with specific learning difficulties to tell stories.  Again, we must ask the question of whether the medium of DV could assist all children in their development of narrative?

Merlet (2000) says that the use of multimedia cues when analysing texts in a new language allows children to comprehend the discussion better.  The facilitative nature of “Semantic Previews” (2000:148) was demonstrated through research, which models real life.  When we converse with a person or group, we look for visual cues to build up our understanding of the dialogue.

Crystal (1995:156) helps us to understand the concept of Semantic Previews by unpicking the way in which we understand the nature of a piece of language through our unconscious calculation of patterns that words make (the Semantic Structure).  Multimedia cues, alongside the text, allow the viewer to gain further insight into the real meaning of the text.

This can be useful when trying to analyse a piece of conversation or text.

This idea is further developed by the work of Worthington (1998) who shows that typography is evolving into a new form – a new alphabet that incorporates audio and visual representation.  This has many benefits, as the visual nature of multimedia needs less interpretation than textual elements.  Examples include the “Intrinsically Direct” (1998: 115) nature of video games where the pictures replace words or visual pictures created from sounds.

New media can also be liberating, as I have found from their use in learning activities for all age groups, and promote Collaborative Creativity.  By this I mean that activities in the classroom, such as newspaper or website creation, seem to lend themselves to collaborative work with children taking on the roles of editor, artist, writer, etc.  The activities are also creative as children will invent content within the supplied framework if they are given the opportunity to do so.  Unfortunately, collaboration is something that any of us who teach examination groups are forced to discourage through rules that insist children work alone on coursework activity.

These new skills must come early in the education of story writing.  Those engaged in the field of typographic training, defined by Pickett (2000) as “the study of the effective use of text, space and other elements in the printed form” have begun to recognise the importance of breaking away from its traditional focus on printed material and look to electronic documents of all forms.

This is commented on by Worthington (1998:117) who says that:

“These skills should not be tacked onto the end of conventional training but be informed by and mixed with traditional knowledge at all levels of design education and therefore be made an intrinsic part of design education.”

We must therefore look for a way to bring the development of effective multi and hyper media tools into the emerging new literacy style that will be defined in the next section.

New literacies

Television, video and multimedia adventures found on home computers and video game consoles are helping children develop a strong visual literacy at an ever earlier age.  Collins et al. (1997) found that, even if children had a poor understanding of the way that textual narratives were constructed – works of fiction with evolving storylines – they are intuitively developing a visual literacy of semiotics, reading films and understanding the meanings therein.  Collins et al. then said that these interpretational skills directly inform their written literacy as they analyse the camera view-points, dialogues and the contexts that the actors find themselves in.  

Kress (2002:71) states that:

“Language in its written form is becoming specialised…. Getting closer to speech-like forms than to what are still considered formal writing-like forms.”

The concept of Visual Literacy is gaining interest from researchers who understand the need to address this area of children’s’ learning.  Callow and Zammit (2002:189) discuss the development of “Visual Systemics” where children “read” visual media, whether traditional multimedia texts or the, by now, familiar hypermedia resources, just as they would textual sources such as books.

Robinson (1997:180) clarifies this with relation to narratives and storytelling by asserting that:

“They (children) are learning about narrative from their encounters with narrative in whichever medium, rather than being taught by video how to read print or visa-versa.”

Beavis (1998:234) contrasts the high culture position of traditional attitudes to non-textual literature with the attitude of young people who “read” the world around themselves.  This high-culture position is in conflict with the reality of young peoples’ lives.  The curriculum must seek to “mediate” (1998:240) between the past and present worlds.

Beavis raises the stakes of this new literacy by saying (1998:243) that:

“The image of literacy that most of us have now will be obsolete before today’s new readers and writers have finished primary school”

and then goes on to link this to the future world of work with the statement that (1998:244):

“There is an increasing importance of being able to read and work with images in the future world that is a “media-text” and “symbol-saturated” environment”

In the absence of an educational process, children are evolving methodologies of dealing with the new opportunities themselves.  Sefton-Green and Reiss (1999:2) state that:

“There is the increasing recognition that culture is not the sole presence of formal education… Young people are using both their consumption of the mass-media and the production techniques now widely available in the leisure environment marketplace to make, share and enjoy electronically mediated cultural experiences”

and go on to define Multimedia Literacies as:

“The ability to work across text, image, sound and moving image with equal fluency, exploring each dimension separately and making connections between these historically discrete domains”

These new literacies are beginning to have an effect on how children develop textual structures.  Armstrong (1990) discusses the development of narrative and, through this, how children tell stories in an inventive and free way (often in the style of visual media) rather than the more formal structure of older generations.  Can we therefore suggest that a new narrative style is developing - almost on its own - amongst the younger generations that will be suited to the use of DV in story writing?

Children are beginning to tell stories in the style that they are most familiar with – television.  Perhaps the most telling piece of social commentary came from Bart and Lisa Simpson when Homer criticized the amount of television that they were watching:

“But it (television) has taught us more than our parents ever have!”

Are the new media teaching children more than schools?

Livingstone (2002:222) comments on the new visual literacy of today’s children and points out that their writing style is becoming increasingly stylised by the new media that saturates their lives – text messages (SMS) and e-mail, with their staccato briefness, and the video style of television and film.  The relationship that this has with teaching and learning becomes clear with the assertion that:

“They (children) have learned to use both text and images to convey messages and when restricted to one form or other for communication, become stifled.  To express their ideas, they must use both.”

Collins et al. (1997) highlight many important concepts in the field of multimodal learning and suggest that learning involves the use of tools to assist in the discovery of information.  Language is vital in this, especially between learners.  DV allows the learner to control the process – to become the producer as well as the consumer, with the teacher as a guide.

Dubois and Vial (2000) explain that multimodal learning is where the learner is forced to engage in additional processing of information because of the integration of textual, visual and auditory cues in material being viewed.  Integration is key here as many simple multimedia resources allow the user to view the text, then bring up a picture and, finally, add auditory resources.  This approach is, at best, bimodal but more often than not, sequential monomodal learning – focussing on one learning approach at a time.

In the research by Collins et al, multimedia (talking books) allowed children to tell stories rather than flatly recount text.  Collins et al. (1997:66) introduce the term “Visual Literacy” to account for this and argue that competence in visual literacy is more or less ignored and therefore children are left to develop their own.

Galda (1993:506) defines visual literacy through the statement that:

“Children today are immersed in a visual culture of television, videos and computers.  While they constantly use and interpret visual images, they often are unable to analyse and think critically about these images.  Children need the ability to see in the fullest sense and to recognise the significance of what they are seeing.  As children become visually literate, they will be able to communicate effectively through both comprehending and creating images in a variety of visual media”

Burmark (2002:5) insists that:

“It is no longer enough to read and write text, and that children must learn to process both text and pictures.  An image-rich curriculum can reach more children and teach them more quickly that traditional written child reports and text-based, verbal instruction ever could.  The age of images brought with it more than just still and moving photographs and was fostered largely by television.”

Whether we are content with it or not, society is moving toward multimodal learning where the words are just as important as the pictures and visa versa.  Children are therefore more confident in their use of visual conversations and have difficulties when asked to perform in a purely textual mode.

Abbott (2001) concludes that Literacy is changing and becoming more complex.  Abbott goes on to state (2001:122) that:

“Young learners are already beginning to cope with an increasingly complex and multimedia-enriched world”

Abbott comments that at the start of the 1980’s, the use of video in the classroom involved moving the class to a viewing room with a technician to operate it.  By the end of the twentieth century, it was no longer possible to view literacy as based on the word or even on the word-based text.  In Abbot’s words (2001:9):

“Literacy today is essentially multimedia, composed of an amalgam of words, pictures, sounds and the moving image.”

Davis and Sullivan (2002:123) state that:

“Communicating with ICT requires some conception of visual literacy of spatial awareness, of sound and of performance.”

They go on to assert that:

“ICT… is not just a useful aid for the teaching and learning of literacy but as something absolutely central to any definition of a confidently literate future citizen.  It inspires their creative use of language into a form that they understand – a new-media centric model of communication.”

This statement, if taken seriously, must have a profound effect on teaching strategies, away from the current focus on textual literacy and on to a more rounded view of literacy as information gathering from many forms.

Carvin introduces us to “Adaptive Literacy” (2002:41) and tells us that literacy is a skill learned as a series of sub-skills and therefore children must be exposed to all of the subsets – visual, textual, technological – as taught skills rather than independently acquired.  Again, as with other quotes in this essay, we are pointed to a new way of teaching and learning.  Carvin defines (2000:42) “Adaptive Literacy” as:

“The willingness to learn new tools and apply previous learning to new situations”

Kress and Van Leewen (1996) outline how we can discuss images in terms of a grammar that must be read, just as a story of words is read.  They go on to state that (1996:15):

“The skill of producing visual texts, however important their role in contemporary society, is not taught in schools.  In terms of visual literacy, education produces illiterates.”

Ohler (2000:1) contends that:

“In an era when children design web sites for projects and integrate video, graphics and animation into their presentations, Art is fast becoming the new literacy for our times.”

With even more certainty, Ohler discusses the leaving behind of a text-centric world and the need as a result to teach visual literacy, rather than let children discover it through the muddled world of television, video games and the Internet.  Multimedia has become the new global language.

On their website, the American Media Literacy Association (AMLA) (2002) state that:

“Today’s information and entertainment technologies communicate to us though a powerful combination of words, images and sounds.  As such we need to develop a wider set of literacy skills, helping us to both comprehend the messages we receive and to effectively utilise these tools to design and distribute our own messages”

Digital video.

From what I have written in the previous sections, it could be suggested that children’s day-to-day experiences predispose them to analyse visual language as effectively as written language.  The conversation between individuals is more than the sum of words spoken – tone, gesture and volume are as much a part of the narrative as words themselves.  Could DV then offer a way of assisting children in the development of effective narratives?

Yelland (1999) comments that recent innovations, such as the integration of video tools like iMovie, may not show long-term benefits yet.  However, it is apparent (when working with Primary age children) that children are engaged in higher level thought processes when working with new-media tools.  Yelland also notes that the products of such work (video presentations and multimedia artefacts) are usually of higher quality.

From Bruntlett’s ideas on classroom-produced multimedia, (1999:74), can we extrapolate the multimodal aspect of multimedia to the use of DV where the storyteller is using pictures and speech to learn narrative structure rather than just text in a more traditional lesson?

Bruntlett (1999) overall makes many observations that the most important part of using multimedia is getting the context right and targeting the equipment (both hardware and software) to a group.  Should each child make a film or should the teacher help groups construct and deconstruct a collaborative work?

When looking at the normal use of word-processing for story-writing, Monteith (2002:17) notes that:

“ we still encourage children to use computers for producing the final ‘best’ copy only” . 

Effective use of word-processing involves the use of its ability to allow reordering of text to perfect the story.

If we can enhance story-writing so simply with effective word-processing use, what then of DV-recording conversation in its natural state?

Children need to become reflective and critical users of multimedia, analysing whether pictures and words tell different stories.  When the children use DV in stories, they read the body language of performers, the language of conversation and the context of the characters therein.

Grahame et al. (2001) point out that, from Key Stage 3, the curriculum expects children to be using sound and video texts in their speaking, listening and writing activities.  Many teachers, they report, are using movie-editing software to develop children’ understanding of textual narratives or to enhance their creativity.

The authors go on to list many possible activities in section 1, including:

“The production and editing of a short child-generated narrative in a specific genre.”

Hay et al. (1994) take the argument about the use of multimedia in education and comment that it allows true constructivist ways of learning as the knowledge, in this case the story, is built by the learner, rather than being supplied by the educator.  In listening to and watching real conversation on DV, children are building their own understanding of the nature of conversational narrative, rather than studying formalised and idealised examples selected by the educator.

In their recent study, Sefton-Green and Parker (2001:11) state that:

“The essential challenge for further research will be to review the commercially available editing programs for the computer, the best known of which are Adobe Premiere and Apple iMovie, to see whether such software may or may not be suitable for school use.”

Sefton-Green and Parker then comment that (2001:53):

“As writing takes a less dominant role in communication (in our culture), it is invariably image and, more often than not, moving image, that moves in to colonise the space that it left behind.”

They conclude (2001:58):

“We would argue that making media is a crucial way of developing critical understanding about the media and this is centrally important for all modern societies”

Researchers using iMovie (Apple Computers, 2001) with Year 6 children found that the use of DV in creativity situations enhanced learning to the point where they were breaking into new areas impossible without the medium.

Scott (2001) was teaching fiction to 9-11 year olds and noted that some floundered and some excelled.  When the author looked at how professional novelists wrote, Scott found that several imagined themselves in a cinema, watching the dialogue unfold before them.

Scott began researching enhancing children understanding of dialogue and narrative through the use of film clips where they observed body language, gesture and the other peripherals around the conversation.  In this way, they more easily visualise the narrative in a more realistic way.

Whilst multimedia is different from DV, many of the concepts behind their roles in enhancing learning are common to both.  Children must engage with the reader in different ways when presenting ideas on screen.  The conversation becomes both auditory and visual as gestures and tones take their place in the dialogue with the viewer.

Atherton (2002) describes the way that multimedia authoring forces the child to consider the audience and therefore engages their creativity in a more dynamic way. 

Barkell (2000) notes from experience that children seem to be able to write more convincing narratives when using film as a key in the classroom but that the originality in the stories was lacking as the plots and scenarios that the films gave were used too closely in the development of the children’s own stories.

Could the use of Digital Video allow children to direct and film their own short stories and, through this, develop more realistic and readable narrative?  It has been commented that watching video can assist the child develop mise-en-scene in their work as they pay attention to camera angles and that they visually interpret the spoken word rather than merely recount it flatly.

We are therefore left with the idea that the use of New Media in education is not only important but essential to a rounded educational experience and can have benefits beyond simply creating a better story.

Research methodology

Many school inspections criticise the lack of real integration of Information and Communications Technology throughout the curriculum as a whole.  Perhaps this is due in no small part to the fear that many have of their own abilities in using the technology and therefore failing in front of a class as their own skills are proved lacking.

A survey of all staff and children from Year 6 (11 years old) to Year 13 (18 years old) was performed before the practical part of the study to judge their preconceptions of what the new technologies offered them.  The results of this are discussed in the next section and a copy of each survey is included in an appendix.

Developing the short story is a important task within the GCSE English curriculum and, where ICT is used, would traditionally employ the abilities of a word processor to work and rework text much as the potter would mould clay to the desired shape.  As had been commented earlier, this process leaves some children behind.  To this end, a new approach was tried.

The nature of the school meant that large-scale studies were not possible (with 20-30 children in a year group).  I therefore decided to split the year group into two halves to give some degree of comparison, in a qualitative sense, rather than relying purely on quantitative methods that might be possible in a larger school.

The use of groups took the following form:

Stage

Time

Group 1

Group 2

Stage 1

2 hours

Storyboard

Storyboard

Stage 2

4 hours

Film

Word-process

Stage 3

2 hours

Transcribe

Film

Stage 4

2 hours

Complete

Film

Table 1: Breakdown of groups and times

All children were asked to storyboard a dramatic dialogue concerning two or three school-friends who were wrestling with an issue that concerns teenagers – drugs, alcohol, teenage pregnancy, etc. and were given one week’s lessons (2 hours) to complete it.

After this, the group were split into two halves.  One half would film their friends improvising the dialogue and then transcribe the result on a word processor.  The other half would type a short story based on the storyboard and then use the editing equipment to ensure that the whole class had experienced the technology for future topics.

The purpose of letting group 2 film after word-processing was to give them experience of the technology to keep the curriculum balanced.  In terms of the story, each group had four hours at the word-processor.

The group of children that used the technology actively within lessons were interviewed afterwards to make a qualitative judgement of whether DV offered a new approach for learning or whether it is more suited to simply recording school events in a more professional manner than was otherwise possible.

The stories were assessed for narrative quality by the child’s English teacher who was unaware of which children had used DV and which had simply word-processed a story.  That data was then analysed by gender, by their end of year examination mark and by the quality of the story to see whether the use of video made a positive or negative difference to their work.

The teacher was then interviewed to see what they felt about the style and quality of the stories and how they had arrived at their assessment of the stories.  A summary of this interview is included in the analysis section.

In terms of defining the style of the research, the survey was conducted in the cross-sectional style as described by Cohen and Manion (1994:68) using a model of survey development outlined (1994:84) with a sample size of over 100 individuals for the children and over 20 for the staff.

The purpose of the more “hands-on” part of the research was to test a new teaching method for its effectiveness and thus its suitability for integration into the curriculum.  This took the form of Action Research although, as I will explain further, it does not fit the standard pattern outlined in the literature.

The main practical research task consisted of analysing an intervention with a control group present.  This did not fall into the pattern of a case study defined by Nisbet and Watt (1984:76) as the “single instance” and looked beyond the simple-experimental described by Wilson (1984:37) who described the pre-testing and post-testing of both control and variant groups.  Instead it was close to the Action Research model described by Cohen and Manion (1984:41) as “situational” in that it “The research looked at a specific context and attempted to solve a problem.”  It also fitted the pattern of Blum as quoted by Cohen and Manion (1984:42) as having two stages, the “diagnostic” – setting out the problem and hypothesising about possible outcomes and the “therapeutic” – testing these hypotheses in a directed change experiment.  What was lacking was the multiple iteration model common of most Action Research (pre-test, intervene, test, intervene, test..) but this was due to the limitations imposed by the timescales available.

We can therefore think of this piece of research as a “basic cycle” as defined by Lewin (1948:202) that would in an ideal world be refined in the further spirals of research.

Elliott (1991:85) does assert that the minimum number of action cycles must be three or four before it is possible to be satisfied with the evidence for improvement however Elliott does state that it is possible to understand the possibilities for improvement after one cycle.

Whatever the limitations of the research possible in the timescale allowed, it did allow space for critical and reflective practice, something which Pollard (2002:62) stresses the importance of.

Presentation of evidence

Analysis of child and teacher questionnaires

To set the context of the experience level of the children and teachers in the school in terms of their previous experiences with technology and their understandings of the possible uses of DV technology, all children from Years 6 to 13 were questioned (N = 114) as well as all teachers (N = 19) as, if the research proved positive, I would need some insight into the attitude of subject teachers to the technology.

Summarising the responses to the questionnaire by calculating the mean of their indicated confidence on a 0 to 10 scale with 10 representing maximum confidence, the overall average confidence towards ICT produced a result of 6.94 (SD = 2.34), which does show that the children, as a body, feel positive towards their use of ICT.  It was noticeable that those children who possessed older equipment at home were also those who felt least able to use ICT in school.

Only 20% of children had experienced DV-Editing inside or outside of school and indicated an overall average feeling towards the use of DV in learning of 6.55 (SD = 1.98).  They were then asked to identify which subjects they felt could most usefully use the technology in the learning experience.  The results, in rank order of percentage choosing each subject, are:

Drama

54

English Literature

16

Modern Foreign Languages

11

Information Technology

43

Science

15

Design Technology

10

Art

36

Child Development

14

Mathematics

7

Music

29

History

13

Textiles

5

English Language

24

Geography

12

Extra Mathematics

5

PSE

18

Extra English

11

Economics

4

Religious Studies

4

Table 2:  Percentage of children considering DV useful to a subject area, n=114.

English Literature

19

Modern Languages

5

Design Technology

5

English Language

14

Information Technology

5

PSE

5

Science

14

Child Development

5

Extra English

5

Drama

10

History

5

Subjects not thought to be worth using DV for:  Art, Music, Geography, Mathematics, Extra Mathematics, Economics, Textiles and Religious Studies.

Table 3:  Percentage of teachers considering DV useful to a subject area, n=19.

When looking at the results from teachers, perhaps the most remarkable change from the children’s answers was the subjects that no teacher thought would usefully benefit from the use of video editing.  This, when talking to those teachers further, was usually due to the perception of not having enough time to do what they were already doing, let alone anything else.  What they also wanted was to see concrete examples of how it could benefit them before they would attempt to use it themselves.

Marking criteria and marker’s comments

When asked to define a “quality” story, the teacher offered the following criteria and said that they were used in the assessment of the stories:

The story should:

1.Have an engaging opening that encourages the reader to want to read on

2.Have a short time-scale – hours rather than days or months

3.Have a central character whose personality is developed throughout the story, particularly in the early stages

4.Make events believable

5.Include dialogue, but only when it adds to the impact of the narrative.  It must not outweigh the narrative.

6.Have an ending that makes the reader think.  This does not have to be a happy ending.

The teacher who marked the stories was interviewed to draw out some of the reasons behind the process by which the scores had been assigned and any insight that could add to the analysis of the results.

It was commented that all of the stories were over laden with dialogue and used the phrase “Neighbours Effect” to explain this.  The teacher felt that a quality story should have a good introduction (scene setting) and should explore the ideas dealt with in the topic.

The teacher expressed the opinion that the final product would depend on the motivation and that experimentation with new experiences worked best with boys.  The teacher felt that, more often than not, girls tended to prefer to stick with ideas and processes that they knew best.

The teacher asked the question of whether the process would benefit those boys who had failed to excel in English more than any other group.  This could not be answered within the realm of this study but could, perhaps, be looked at in a further work.

Interviews with children

When I spoke to some of the children who participated in the research, I found that they were generally positive about the use of digital video in assisting story-writing but had some interesting insights into benefits and drawbacks of the system.

One student that I interviewed, a boy for whom English is not the first language and who used film to assist the story, commented that their difficulties with spoken English made it difficult to transpose the story as they did not always understand the language being used.  This made the task slower than just using the word-processor.  They did acknowledge, however, that their finished story had better dialogue than they would have created through their own understanding had they just used a word processor alone.  They asserted that they would have been able to create a better story in their first language by this method and that they felt that it offered a better understanding of what “real people said”

Another student, a similar boy who did not use digital video first, said that they found it difficult to come up with the conversation and wished that they had had the advantage of the film that they saw the others using.  This was compounded by English not being their first language.  When asked how they came up with the dialogue, they said that they thought of what characters would have said on television and then created conversations in a similar style but without the advantage of listening to it as they created.  This student had better verbal understanding of English than written English.

A boy for whom English was their first language but was dyslexic and had an English exam score in the lower half of the year, said that he found it very difficult to transpose what people were saying and so he found it very time consuming.  Part of the problem was extracting the conversation from the hesitant language of students unfamiliar with improvisation.

He suggested that he found the experience positive in terms of understanding the way people spoke in real life, that it gave a permanent record that could be referred to again and again and that is was fun trying a new way of attacking an old task.  He felt that it would have been more useful if he had chosen the “actors” more carefully.

Speaking to one of the girls who did not use DV to assist in their stories, she explained that she created dialogue through the inspiration of conversations around her and felt that this freedom to express her own thoughts and ideas was empowering.  To use other students improvisations would limit her creativity.  She then said that she thought the use of DV made story-writing easier from what she had seen during the project but that she preferred to do it the hard way.

This view was echoed by another girl who word-processed the story without the use of DV who saw the students using the technology and would have liked to have the chance to use it.  She said that she used conversations with her peers and dialogue on the media to inspire her as she found coming up with dialogue difficult.  She also said that film-clips would have been useful.

Finally, a girl who did use DV to assist in her story-writing said that it allowed her to achieve realism in her dialogues at the expense of imaginativeness, that it gave good visual cues that just required embellishing when recorded in text and that the process of listening to other students gave ideas for a good story.

She did find the use of DV time consuming and felt that it reduced the amount of her own creativity that could be brought to bear on the creation of an effective story.

Experiences whilst conducting the research

I noted that, during the filming and recording phase, the girls were almost always engaged on the task, whether in the word-processing group (non-filmers) or the filming group.  The boys in the filming group were much more focused than the boys in the word-processing group.  (This was an observation rather than a quantifiable measure of “on-task”)

Image 1:  Improvisation by students

Image 2:  A conversation being recorded

The group that were using the word processor immediately after storyboarding (the “non-filmers) were generally on-task, although the girls seemed more able to concentrate on creating the stories from their imagination, whereas the boys seemed lost at times, as though the raw materials of a story were not present.

The students waiting for the camera to become free for their story to be recorded, watched the others with amazing patience and gained insights as to the process that they would use.

Quantitative analysis of story assessment data

To analyse the data, the group were divided into filmers (N = 10) and non-filmers (N = 11).  The English Examination (End of Year) was recorded as was the English teacher’s assessment of the quality of the narrative (the “story score” was a mark out of 10 according to the criteria that the teacher uses to mark all short stories in the course of the development of the children’s GCSE work), the subjects’ gender and, as the data was readily available, whether they had been assessed as having dyslexia and their NFER Mean Standardised Assessment Score (SAS) score.  Means, Standard Deviations and t-tests were then calculated for each group according to the method described by St. John and Richardson (1996), including the critical values for different degrees of freedom.  The data was entered into Microsoft Excel and the formula defined by St. John and Richardson for calculating t-tests was entered in.

Firstly taking story score for males vs. females, there was a significant difference showing that females (N = 11) performed better in stories than males (N = 10), t(21) = 4.07, p < 0.05.  The mean story score for females was 6.18 (SD = 1.00) and for males was 4.20 (SD = 1.00).

Secondly, there was a significant difference showing that those who use film (N = 10) to aid their essay performed better than those who did not (N = 11), t(19) = 1.89, p < 0.05.  The mean story score for filmers was 5.80 (SD = 1.40) and for non-filmers 4.73 (SD = 1.49).

With reference to children with dyslexia, there was again clear evidence that students with dyslexia (N = 4) performed less well in the writing of stories than those without dyslexia (N = 17), t(17) = 2.85, p < 0.05.  The mean story score for dyslexic students was 4.75 (SD = 0.50) and for non-dyslexic 5.35 (SD = 1.65).

Moving onto the finer detail of how the use of digital video helped each gender, we will first see that boys perform significantly better using DV to write stories, t(8) = 1.92, p < 0.05.  The mean essay score for boys using film (N = 5) was 4.75 (SD = 1.26) and not using film (N = 5) was 3.83 (SD = 0.98).

Similarly, for girls we see that they perform significantly better when using film than when not t(12) = 1.92, p < 0.05.  The mean story score for girls using film (N = 5) was 6.50 (SD = 1.05) and for girls not using film (N = 6) was 5.80 (SD = 1.30).

By comparing the mean performance of boys using and not-using film and the same for girls, we can see that boys benefit from the use of DV twice as much as girls (24.02% improvement vs. 12.07%).

The Mean English Writing Examination Score for boys was 51.30% (SD = 16.00) whereas for girls it was 62.55% (SD = 12.00).  Girls performed 21.93% better than boys in their end of year examination.

For the NFER Standardised Attainment Test score, the mean for boys was 101.3 (SD = 12.00) and for girls was 108.4 (SD = 8.19).  This shows that, on a standardised scale of intelligence testing, girls performed only 7.01% better than boys.

When we compare the data by story writing group (filmers and non-filmers) we find that the mean of the English Writing Examination Score differed only by 2.68% (filmers 56.40% (SD = 16.24) and non-filmers 57.91% (SD = 12.84)).  This showed that the two groups were comparable in terms of their ability in the subject of English and in writing in particular.

When comparing the NFER scores, we find a 5.03% difference in their scores (filmers 102.30 (SD = 13.00) and non-filmers 107.45 (SD = 8.00)) showing that, in raw intelligence terms, there was little difference between the two groups.

Finally, in order to discount the relationship between simple academic ability or intelligence and story score, mean story scores and correlation coefficients were calculated for Story Score against English Exam Result (Academic Performance) and Story Score against NFER Mean SAS Score (Intelligence Analysis).  The results showed no significant correlation between the quality of the story and academic ability (correlation = 0.558) or intelligence (correlation = 0.323).

I would conclude from the above analysis of data that the use of Digital Video makes a statistically significant difference in the construction of stories for those children who used it, compared to those who simply used a word processor to draft and redraft text.

The English teacher correctly identified the majority (70%) of the essays from the filmers as having used video, however they also incorrectly identified more than half (64%) of the non-filmers as having used film.

Looking at the data produced, in terms of the percentage differences between means, the following statements and inferences can be made:

When comparing the mean NFER score for the boys, 101.3 (SD = 12.00), with that for the girls, 108.4 (SD = 8.19), we see that there is a 7.01% difference in favour of the girls.  However, when we compare performance in the English examination for writing, we see a much larger difference.  The mean score for boys was 51.30% (SD = 16.00) whereas for girls it was 62.55% (SD = 12.00).  Girls therefore performed 21.93% better than boys in their end of year examination.  This would appear to follow the national trends in under-performance of boys in English Language.

In fact, when the English department at the school looked at a more specific examination result at the end of the year, they found that the mean of the girls’ examination scores for fictional story writing was 47.14% better than the mean of the boys’ scores.

When we compare the scores for those that used film and those that did not, we see that the mean score for those using film was 5.80 (SD = 1.40) and for non-filmers 4.73 (SD = 1.49).  We could therefore infer that the use of DV improves story writing by 22.62%.

If we compare the mean story scores for filmers and non filmers by gender, we find that male filmers had a mean story score of 4.75 (SD = 1.26) and male non-filmers 3.83 (SD = 0.98), female filmers had a mean story score of 6.50 (SD = 1.05) and female non-filmers 5.80 (SD = 1.30).  The difference between story scores for males and females was therefore 36.84% for the filmers and 51.44% for the non-filmers.  From this we can infer than the use of film closed the gap between boys and girls and that boys benefit from the use of DV twice as much as girls (24.02% improvement vs. 12.07%).

As already stated, the filmer vs non-filmer group were matched on gender and ability (only a 2.68% difference between their average English examination results and 5.03% difference on NFER mean SAS.) and so these were unlikely to be factors in the improved performance.

From the evidence presented here, it could be suggested that, even with the relatively small sample size, the use of DV technology has a positive effect on storytelling, whether viewed as a whole, by gender or dyslexia.

This improvement was independent of ability in English as a subject or ability as measured by the NFER CAT tests.

Boys could be seen to benefit most from the new method, although they still fell behind the girls who had not used film.

In summary, the grades achieved for the stories can be shown best by the following histogram:

Chart 1: Mean Story Score vs. Group Type

Qualitative Analysis of Other Evidence

From interviews with the children and the teacher responsible for marking the work, it was clear that the benefits were not just down to the “wow-factor” of the new technology but through the children being able to bring their story ideas to life and produce convincing narrative dialogues.

From the information gained through interview with the teacher marking the stories, the most startling information that can be drawn from the study is that the teacher was unable to effectively differentiate between the children who used film and those who did not when they looked at the style of the writing.

This would seem to fit into the observations of Armstrong (1990), Collint et al. (1997), Robinson (1997), Beavis (1998), Sefton-Green and Reiss (1999), Abbot (2001) and Davis and Sullivan (2002) who suggest that children are developing a new writing style through Visual Literacy and that it was most noticeable in narrative dialogues with their close relationship to video media.

The teacher marking the essays felt that, as is quoted in the report on the interview earlier, all of the students had, to some extent, been influences by the visual media and so it was difficult to tell who had directly used film to create the story.  Simply put, the children who used film did not create stories that were significantly different in style to those of their peers using other approaches, just of better quality.

The small size of the dyslexic sub-group (two filmers and two non-filmers) meant that no meaningful quantitative data could be gathered, however the anecdotal evidence from observations and interviews was that it was considered beneficial by some of the students and not as useful by others, depending of the nature of the dyslexia.

Conclusions

We can see that an improvement in story-writing was observed when looking at the group that used DV contrasted with the group that did not, that gender does seem to play a role with boys benefiting from the use of technology twice as much as the girls but that, importantly, all groups of children improved to some extent.

When looking for reasons for the improvement, one possibility could be the role of Multiple Intelligences (MI) in the child’s development of narrative.  Could the use of DV as a tool be more useful for some children than others because they are naturally more suited to the medium?  Certainly the interviews with the children showed that some found it distinctly beneficial whilst others would not want to use DV every time they came to write a story as they felt that their imagination was enough to create realistic dialogue.  Perhaps the approach of Scott (2001), who uses film clips to teach about dialogue and scene-setting, would be more useful for those students?  DV offers another tool to assist students in their linguistic creativity.

For those children who have developed more slowly in the Linguistic Intelligence area but are more capable in the Spatial Intelligence area, could DV help them to realise story ideas that they have in a non-linguistic form in their minds, as Gardner (1993) would suggest?   By storyboarding their abstract thoughts in pictorial form for the “actors” to role-play, the child that has difficulty constructing text can bring their ideas to life.

Armstrong (1994) also comments on the need to use more visual-based learning techniques with those children who have strength in the Spatial Intelligence area whereas children who are strong in Linguistic Intelligence are catered for in most of the more traditional methodologies of learning and perhaps do not need the assistance of video although I would argue that these children need their understanding of narrative language refreshed through the observation and analysis of real conversation rather than the text-based methods more familiar in the classroom.

With the time that the use of DV adds to story-writing, evidence needs to be gathered to see whether any of the factors discussed above have a bearing on its usefulness and so allow teachers to use DV in a more targeted way.

The research question of whether DV could have a positive effect on narrative dialogues has been answered and would appear to be true from the evidence presented.

The benefits were most felt by those children who were failing to achieve highly in this area of their studies – boys and children with dyslexia – but benefits were present for all groups of children.

The publication of recent research, as quoted in news reports (BBC News 16th November 2002, Elliott 31st January 2003) has confirmed the positive effect of the use of film in the curriculum.

BBC News Online report that (2002):

“The use of Digital Video can raise pupils’ enthusiasm for what they are studying”

In a report on the use of digital video in a film-making project in a secondary school, Elliott, J (2003) reports that:

“Although the (use of) film had not made the students into model pupils, it had helped keep them interested in their school work.”

More research is needed in this area to ascertain the nature of the usefulness of Digital Video in schools, whether as a motivational tool as some research suggests or as a tool for quantifiable academic benefit.

The only issue that I would add is that the time implications for the process are large and ways to improve this would have to be found, whether through the purchase of more DV cameras, the use of stock DV clips or limiting the use of the technology in English to those children who would benefit most.

Most surprising to those who have not read the extensive literature on Visual and Media Literacy, is the development of a new writing style within a whole new literacy that is being cultivated in our children, not by school but by the New Media itself.  This cannot be ignored and, for myself at the very least, must have profound effects on the nature of teaching in schools.  The use of DV in assisting the story writing process did not change this new writing style as, by its very nature, the children used it just as they would use any other media resource for inspiration.

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Appendix:  Survey of students and teachers confidence with ICT

Student Questionnaires.

Following Davidson’s methodology for survey creation, as outlined in Cohen and Manion (1997) the study began by defining the objective of the survey – “To ascertain students’ prior knowledge and experience of DV editing and their opinions on how useful it could be in enhancing their learning” and from here moved onto identifying the subsidiary topics:

1.How confident do they feel in their own ability in ICT?
0 to 10 scale with 10 most positive

2.What ICT equipment do they have access to at home?
List

3.Have they used DV editing technology in school or at home?
Yes/No

4.Do they feel that DV could be used in their learning experiences and, if so, in which subjects do they feel it could most appropriately be used?
0 to 10 scale on reaction to statement together with scales for each subject area

5.What do they feel is the biggest factor limiting their use of ICT within their learning experiences?
Free text answer

Teacher Questionnaires

In a similar fashion to the students, the survey aimed to discover the teacher’s familiarity with the topic and, from there, to see how they felt that it could be made to apply to their subject area.  The focus therefore became “To ascertain teachers’ prior knowledge and experience of DV editing and their opinions on how useful it could be in enhancing their teaching”

1.How confident do they feel in their own ability in ICT?
0 to 10 scale with 10 most positive

2.What ICT equipment do they have access to at home?
List

3.Have they used DV editing technology in school or at home?
Yes/No

4.Do they feel that DV could be used in their teaching and, if so, in which areas of their subject do they feel it could most appropriately be used?
0 to 10 scale on reaction to statement together with free text for extended response.

5.What do they feel is the biggest factor limiting their use of ICT within their teaching?
Free text answer

The questionnaires were then drawn up before a sample group tested the questionnaire and responded with comments.  Revisions were made after discussion with the trial group and the general student and teacher body surveyed.  The responses were then analysed.

Student Questionnaire (Trial)

1.How confident are you at using Information and Communications Technology, at home or in school?

Circle the number that best describes you.

Not confident at all

No Opinion

Very Confident

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

2.What ICT equipment do you have access to at home?

Tick any boxes that apply to you

Computers

Apple iMac

PC Desktop Computer

Apple G4

PC Laptop Computer

Apple iBook

Microsoft Windows 95

Apple Powerbook

Microsoft Windows 98

Mac OS 8

Microsoft Windows ME

Mac OS 9

Microsoft Windows 2000

Mac OS X

Microsoft Windows XP

Peripherals

Digital Still Camera

The Internet

Digital Video Camera

MP3 Player

Scanner

DVD Player

CD Writer

DVD Writer

3.Have you used Digital Video editing technology in school or at home?
Yes / No (Circle the correct response)

4.Do you feel that Digital Video Editing (Making your own movies) could be used in your learning experiences ?

Circle the number that best describes your feeling about this.

Not Useful

No Opinion

Very Useful

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

5.If you gave a “6” or above to question 4, which subjects would best suit Digital Video Editing?

Tick all that are appropriate

English Language

Physics

English Literature

Chemistry

Art

Biology

Music

Mathematics

French

Information Technology

Spanish

Geography

History

Child Development

German

Textiles

Cantonese

Design Technology

Economics

TOK (Sixth Form)

PSE

Extra English

Religious Studies

Extra Mathematics

Drama

6.What do you feel is the biggest factor limiting your use of ICT within your different learning experiences?

Name: ________________________________________  Thank you for your time.

Teacher Questionnaire (Trial)

1.How confident are you at using Information and Communications Technology, at home or in school?

Circle the number that best describes you.

Not confident at all

No Opinion

Very Confident

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

2.What ICT equipment do you have access to at home or in your teaching?

Tick any boxes that apply to you

Computers

Apple iMac

PC Desktop Computer

Apple G4

PC Laptop Computer

Apple iBook

Microsoft Windows 95

Apple Powerbook

Microsoft Windows 98

Mac OS 8

Microsoft Windows ME

Mac OS 9

Microsoft Windows 2000

Mac OS X

Microsoft Windows XP

Peripherals

Digital Still Camera

The Internet

Digital Video Camera

MP3 Player

Scanner

DVD Player

CD Writer

DVD Writer

3.Have you used Digital Video editing technology in school or at home?
Yes / No (Circle the correct response)

4.Do you feel that Digital Video Editing (Making your own movies) could be used in your teaching ?

Circle the number that best describes your feeling about this.

Not Useful

No Opinion

Very Useful

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

5.If you gave a “6” or above to question 4, which subjects that you teach, would best suit Digital Video Editing?

Tick all that are appropriate

English Language

Physics

English Literature

Chemistry

Art

Biology

Music

Mathematics

French

Information Technology

Spanish

Geography

History

Child Development

German

Textiles

Cantonese

Design Technology

Economics

TOK (Sixth Form)

PSE

Extra English

Religious Studies

Extra Mathematics

Drama

6.What do you feel is the biggest factor limiting your use of ICT within your teaching?

Name: _______________________________________   Thank you for your time.

Student Questionnaire (Final)

1.How confident (happy or not nervous) are you at using Information and Communications Technology, at home or in school?

Circle the number that best describes you.

Not confident at all

No Opinion

Very Confident

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

2.What ICT equipment do you have access to at home.  If you are a boarder, include computers that you use outside of the normal school day?

Tick any boxes that apply to you

Computers

Apple G3 (Older Style)

PC Desktop Computer

Apple iMac

PC Laptop Computer

Apple G4

Microsoft Windows 95

Apple iBook

Microsoft Windows 98

Apple Powerbook

Microsoft Windows ME

Mac OS 8

Microsoft Windows 2000

Mac OS 9

Microsoft Windows XP

Mac OS X

Other Computer

Peripherals (Things attached to the computer)

Digital Still Camera

The Internet

Digital Video Camera

MP3 Player

Scanner

DVD Player

CD Writer

DVD Writer

3.Have you used Digital Video editing technology in school or at home?
Yes / No (Circle the correct answer)

4.Do you feel that Digital Video Editing (Making your own movies) could be used in your learning experiences (lessons and other activities)?

Circle the number that best describes your feeling about this.

Not Useful

No Opinion

Very Useful

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

5.If you gave a “6” or above to question 4, (in other words, you think making short films would be useful) which subjects would best suit Digital Video Editing?

Tick all that you think would find DV-Editing useful;

English Language

Physics

English Literature

Chemistry

Art

Biology

Music

Mathematics

French

Information Technology

Spanish

Geography

History

Child Development

German

Textiles

Cantonese

Design Technology

Economics

TOK (Sixth Form)

PSE

Extra English

Religious Studies

Extra Mathematics

Drama

6.What do you feel is the biggest thing holding back your use of ICT within your different learning experiences, whether in school or outside?

Name: _________________________________________     Thank you for your time.

Teacher Questionnaire (Final)

1.How confident are you at using Information and Communications Technology, at home or in school?

Circle the number that best describes you.

Not confident at all

No Opinion

Very Confident

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

2.What ICT equipment do you have access to at home or actively use in your teaching?

Tick any boxes that apply to you

Computers

Apple iMac

PC Desktop Computer

Apple G4

PC Laptop Computer

Apple iBook

Microsoft Windows 95

Apple Powerbook

Microsoft Windows 98

Mac OS 8

Microsoft Windows ME

Mac OS 9

Microsoft Windows 2000

Mac OS X

Microsoft Windows XP

Peripherals

Digital Still Camera

The Internet

Digital Video Camera

MP3 Player

Scanner

DVD Player

CD Writer

DVD Writer

3.Have you used Digital Video editing technology in school or at home?  (Apple iMovie, Adobe Premiere or other software on a computer to edit a movie taken on a video camera.)
Yes / No (Circle the correct response)

4.Do you feel that Digital Video Editing (Making short movies) could be used in your teaching?

Circle the number that best describes your feeling about this.

Not Useful

No Opinion

Very Useful

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

5.If you gave a “6” or above to question 4, (you think the technology could be useful) which subjects that you teach, would best suit Digital Video Editing?

Tick all that are appropriate

English Language

Physics

English Literature

Chemistry

Art

Biology

Music

Mathematics

French

Information Technology

Spanish

Geography

History

Child Development

German

Textiles

Cantonese

Design Technology

Economics

TOK (Sixth Form)

PSE

Extra English

Religious Studies

Extra Mathematics

Drama

6.What do you feel is the biggest factor limiting your use of ICT within your teaching?

Name: ______________________________              Thank you for your time.