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EDTC 6433 Digital Storytelling Project

Our "TH" Digraph Story



I chose to make my digital story about letter sounds, specifically the digraph TH.  Since I teach first grade, a lot of our phonics focus is centered around digraphs and blends, so I thought this would be a good project for students to work on.  This connects to the first ISTE standard because it allows students to use their creativity and imagination to teach an audience about a simple phonics sound. 
I made this video with two of my students that were already familiar with puppet pals and iMovie. 

I plan on having my students create something similar, and allowing them to choose from 4 digraphs: TH, CH, SH, or WH.  Since two of my students have already helped make this video, they will be a great resource to the class when it is time to make the videos on their own.  I plan on having students use the same tools that we did- puppet pals to create the digital story and iMovie to put all of the puppet pals clips together with a beginning and an ending. 

One challenged that I initially faced once I decided that I was going to tell a story about letters was how I was going to get the letters to actually seem like characters.  Many digital stories that I had watched were actually recorded by a camera and then put into iMovie, so I was thinking about ways I could make actual letter puppets.  It wasn’t until one of my students created their own character on puppet pals that I realized how perfect puppet pals would be for this type of video.  From there, I just drew the characters and pictures needed for the story through a drawing app on my iPad and uploaded them to puppet pals. 

While this format wouldn’t be the best option for a lot of longer stories, I knew I wanted my students videos to be just around 1-2 minutes.  Since we were doing short clips, this worked out well. 

Image Citations:
Youngson, N. (photographer). [2015] image of honey. Retrieved from http://www.picserver.org/h/honey01.html

unknown. (photographer). [2017] image of houses. Retrieved from https://pxhere.com/en/photo/1343997

Tango Project. (graphic creator) [2007] graphic of winking face. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Face-wink.svg

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