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Slide Notes

In the last months, as I have been telling students, teachers, and people in my life about this presentation I have pretty much been met with blank looks. So far I have had to explain what machinima is to everyone. Most of you are here because you are already interested in creating machinima or using machinima in your classrooms. I'm going to make a pitch here today for spreading the word. Machinima is a wonderful, engaging opportunity for students to come to school and learn with passion. Unfortunately, too often this opportunity is being overlooked because educators are not working collaboratively. I can speak from experience that English Language Arts teachers often view the worlds of gaming and technology as foreign, a time grab, or sometimes even the root of all evil. My goal today is to arm you with a few specific ideas that will enable you to collaborate with literacy educators to add more value to student created machinima.

I'm also framing these ideas with ideas from the psychology of motivation/learning. I know you know these ideas, but it's helpful to review them as a frame work and justification for the more practical ideas that will follow.

The trend for removing agency from learning has been accelerating with the accountability movement. I am hoping that with CCSS that we will begin to remember the importance of students learning for their own purposes and intrinsic rewards.
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Literacy Affordances of Machinima

Published on Nov 18, 2015

A presentation for the Machinima fest at the 2015 ISTE conference (International Society for Technology Education).

PRESENTATION OUTLINE

Literacy Affordances of Machinima

Tools rather than Trophies or Terror
In the last months, as I have been telling students, teachers, and people in my life about this presentation I have pretty much been met with blank looks. So far I have had to explain what machinima is to everyone. Most of you are here because you are already interested in creating machinima or using machinima in your classrooms. I'm going to make a pitch here today for spreading the word. Machinima is a wonderful, engaging opportunity for students to come to school and learn with passion. Unfortunately, too often this opportunity is being overlooked because educators are not working collaboratively. I can speak from experience that English Language Arts teachers often view the worlds of gaming and technology as foreign, a time grab, or sometimes even the root of all evil. My goal today is to arm you with a few specific ideas that will enable you to collaborate with literacy educators to add more value to student created machinima.

I'm also framing these ideas with ideas from the psychology of motivation/learning. I know you know these ideas, but it's helpful to review them as a frame work and justification for the more practical ideas that will follow.

The trend for removing agency from learning has been accelerating with the accountability movement. I am hoping that with CCSS that we will begin to remember the importance of students learning for their own purposes and intrinsic rewards.
Photo by Bu Yousef

Tools

Used to help accomplish goals/work
I am a great believer in the importance of intrinsic motivation. I want students to be driven by their own purposes and goals as they acquire skills and strategies.

"So what" is something that Cris Tovani often uses to describe the affect of discouraged/disengaged learners. In her classroom the most resistant learner would regularly respond to Cris's teaching with the dismissal "So what." We have millions of students in and and out of schools who are saying "so what" both loudly and silently. Drop-outs and under-performing students are in the "so what" camp. They see little relevance in school to anything that they care about.

In our frantic rush to meet standards, teachers and other educators have been pressured to focus on scores rather than the actual skills and strategies that students are acquiring. In my own sphere of influence a great example of this is the effect that DIBELS (or AIMS web) has had on literacy learning. I am seeing waves of children coming to our literacy lab who can pronounce words quickly and accurately but do not understand or remember anything of what they have read. They do not see reading as a way to learn or as a path to personal enrichment (aka fun!).

Machinima offers the possibility of using a situated learning opportunity to help students advance their learning of literacy and technology skills and strategies. In doing so they acquire "tools" that they can apply powerfully and flexibly in a wide variety of settings. However it will take teachers or "more knowledgeable others" (Vygotsky) to scaffold their learning.

Trophies

External Rewards
One alternative to intrinsic motivation is extrinsic motivation. Everything we know about motivation and engagement tells us that learning driven by external rewards is short-lived. Starting with memorization of spelling words to pass the weekly spelling test up to reading "Cliff's Notes" instead of great literature, we are constantly being given evidence that external rewards are not giving us the results that we want or need.
Photo by Brad.K

Terror

The Big Stick
And of course, there is the worst-case. Sometimes, certainly not in your classrooms, students are actually threatened with grades. In my world we talk about the importance of literature discussion groups or taking writing to the publication stage. In both of these cases teachers are moving beyond a single audience for student work. Instead of the teacher being the only audience (and the grader) students go public with their learning. Machinima also allows us to move into a context in which students are engaging in academic tasks with a purpose that goes beyond trophies or terror. As they do so they acquire the tools of expression and communication (also referred to as the language arts).

Photo by mikefisher821

Working Smarter

Literacy & Machinima Together
When you talk with language arts teachers you are going to have to make a real pitch for the value of machinima. Because many of them don't play games and sometimes blame gaming for lowered reading and writing scores it will be especially important that you have specific "buzz words" that will grab their attention.

Language Arts and reading teachers along with math teachers are receiving a lot of the pressure for achievement on CCSS and other state's standards. They will be particularly receptive if you connect the idea of machinima to specific standards.

If each of us take a small part in making literacy development a greater focus in machinima we will all share the load of expectations for achievement as well as the rewards.
Photo by kaezenovka

Literacy Skills

Teaching for Transfer
The specific literacy skills that can be developed through the planning and creation of machinima are myriad. Yet, they will not necessarily emerge magically. It will take some intentional work on the part of educators to help insure transfer of skills between the language arts and technology classrooms and labs. It is easy to forget how each time the context changes we have to again scaffold transfer.



Photo by kenming_wang

What was I thinking?

Let me offer an experience from my own teaching. When I was a high school literacy coach I had the opportunity to team teach a notemaking unit with an history teacher including his AP courses. After two weeks of careful modeling, guided practice and independent practice we were both certain that our students had learned these skills well. Later that month I was standing in the English Resource Center and one of the AP students approached me. It's important to know a little about this young man. He was a top student from a family of doctors and lawyers. He was motivated as a learner and had high expectations of himself.

He approached me and asked if I had any tips for helping with a term paper that his history teacher had assigned. Now there is a second important bit of background for this story. I also knew that the previous quarter in his English class had been devoted to term paper.

So, I asked him, "Have you thought about using the term paper skills you learned in English last quarter?" He froze, with a blank look on his face. After a noticeable pause he replied, "You mean we are supposed to use that stuff from English in history!"

If our very best students have trouble with transfer, we need to be very careful that we are intentional and explicit in making opportunities for transfer clear to students.
Photo by Steven Leith

Literacy Skills

  • Planning (story board, script or treatment)
  • Text-Structures (organization)
  • Dialogue
  • Transitions
  • Word Choice (6+1 traits)
  • Setting/Description
  • Titles/subtitles (text structure & format aids)
Here is a beginning list of literacy skills and strategies that should be fertile ground for transfer between literacy instruction and machinima development. They address core standards related to reading comprehension, vocabulary, and writing. If you are working with a hesitant language arts teacher it may work best to ask what reading and writing skills are most in need of development at this point. Based on the teacher's concerns you can offer suggestions for collaborative activities that will address those concerns.

As a language arts teacher I have had great successes collaborating with cross-disciplinary colleagues. However, not all teachers are comfortable with this. Sometimes it is easiest to begin with a teacher who is enthusiastic about the possibilities and model for other teachers how effective and satisfying the collaboration can be. But, you will need to go further. Once you've established a successful collaboration you need to reach out and bring more teachers into the party. Too often I've seen isolated successes disappear when a teacher moves or retires. Without intentional transfer to other classrooms, success can be isolating.


Photo by draxtor

Planning

  • Treatment (the pitch)
  • Storyboard
  • Script
We don't have time today to discuss all these various ideas but I want to provide at least a few specific take-aways that will give you something substantial for work with students or teachers.

The most obvious transfer point for language arts teachers is going to be the writing involved with planning a machinima production. We know that students can get carried away with graphics and software and find themselves in a puddle on the floor without a skeleton. They are going to want to jump on the computer and start working without a plan. Sharing the writing activities used by professionals will save them time and frustration. When I have teamed with other content area teachers we developed collaborations like this. For example while I was teaching 8th grade language arts I took on the responsibility of teaching notetaking and report writing skills while the history teacher taught the content and historical research skills. We ended up with wonderful reports about the Civil War (with the exception of the student who wrote an entire report about the Cizzle War).

A great way to begin this work is to ask students to write a "treatment" (I'm taking some of these ideas from "Digital Moviemaking" by Lynne S. Gross (2009). A treatment is used to sell the idea for a movie and usually offers a brief summary of the story along with broad outlines of the characters, plot and settings. Students would need to generate several paragraphs providing a working idea for their machinima in a treatment.

The second writing activity is a storyboard. These tend to look like comics panels and include a rough idea of scenes, actions, and dialogue. The can be be rough pencil sketches on paper or more elaborate renditions using a variety of software.

Finally comes the script--the actual detailed dialogue, stage directions, description of settings and lighting (mood).
Photo by Dave77459

They will resist!

This may be something that requires a "failure" experience before students embrace the time savings and final professionalism of the product that a story board or script will provide. As I review various machinima on YouTube it's very clear to me that storyboarding and scripting would help a lot. Perhaps a good way to persuade students that this is a good use of their time would be to critique various machinima. (Great writers are great readers. Great directors and producers are great viewers!)

A good way to gently persuade is to have students view some good and some bad machinima with rubrics or check lists. In preparing for this presentation I've watched hours of both good and bad machinima. My current hit of bad practices that would be improved through story boarding and scripting includes:

Being "tongue tied" and filling in with "hmmmm," singing, or rambling on.

Scenes that are too long. Or machinima that are poorly edited.

Poor word choice or lack of clarity (my guild laughs at me when I say "unclear anaphoric referents!). But using clear nouns, verbs and interesting words definitely improves a production.

On the other hand, well scripted machinima are a delight to watch.

My problem here is being able to recommend good machinima instructional videos for use in classrooms. So far many of the "how to" videos I've watched are filled with school inappropriate language. I'd love some recommendations for good "how to make machinima" videos that are good for use with students.

Text-Structures

  • CCSS--argumentation
  • Compare/contrast
  • Cause/effect
  • Problem/solution
  • Chronological (time order)
  • Process (how to step-by-step)
  • Definition/example
  • Simple listing
  • Narrative
A second reading/writing skill that is critical for successful machinima is related to text-structures. Unfortunately somehow CCSS got hung up on argumentative writing. As you can see from this list there are many other structures that students need to master for success in the world.

Attention to text-structure has a double benefit. Not only is text-structure essential to good writing but it is also a powerful tool in reading comprehension. According to Pearson & Hansen, perceiving and using text-structures is the single most effective tool for improving comprehension of readings.

If students resist the story board or script writing a great tool for helping them create effective machinima will be to use a graphic organizer to plan the movie. If they want to create a "how to build X" in MineCraft then a process organization (using a flow chart) will be helpful. If they are producing a machinima to respond to a book (like last year's award winning Harry Potter machinima) then a narrative "witch hat" organizer would be best.

The graphic organizers are powerful tools for writing, notemaking and summarizing readings. They are well worth the time in a language arts classroom.
Photo by MattHurst

Lee Ann Tysseling

Boise State University
Lee Ann Tysseling, Ph.D.
Boise State University
ltysseling@boisestate.edu
1910 University Drive
Boise, Idaho 83725-1725
208-426-3271

leesbooks@blogspot.com

Thank you all for coming. I hope that we will have some moments to talk about your experiences with machinima and perhaps your insights into the literacy and language arts skills and strategies that can be developed through machinima making.