Case study: Cross-curricular story writing

This project was published in Innovations in learning technologies for English language teaching (2013), edited by Gary Motteram for the British Council. It was carried out at a school in Istanbul, by English teacher Özge Karaoğlu. Together with practitioners from the Art and the ICT departments, Özge helped their five- and six-year old children work on a year-long cross-curricular story writing project: an audio-enabled talking book based on two imaginary characters (Bubble and Pebble).

The children were granted the freedom to develop their own collaborative stories and the English teacher provided them with storyboards to support the flow of their ideas. During Art classes, moreover, the teacher provided them with assets and models upon which to design the animations for their story. As the objective of the project was to consolidate new vocabulary, the children were required to integrate this vocabulary repetitively throughout the story.

The narrative was recorded by a few of the more confident speakers in the class using a sound recording application on the computer, and afterwards, one of the teachers created the eBook using Adobe Creative Suite 5.5, which was published to the Apple store using iBook.

‘Bubble and Pebble’ illustrates well how technology can be harnessed to unite the different elements of the Cameron framework presented above. It is also illustrative of the ideas that underpin content and language integrated learning (CLIL), in which a number of departments within a school work together to support language development. In addition, it gives the opportunity for children to become digital publishers, thus developing their digital literacy. Authoring for a specific audience encourages children to think carefully about the suitability of the language they are using as well as ensuring that the activities make sense, are culturally appropriate and will be engaging enough to sustain interest.

You can see a preview of the app in iTunes.

If we analyse the case from the point of view of the TPCK model, I believe the teacher successfully reached the level of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK). According to Koehler and Mishra, TPCK is more than just having sufficient knowledge of the three levels (TK, PK, CK) individually:

Underlying truly meaningful and deeply skilled teaching with technology, TPACK is different from knowledge of all three concepts individually. Instead, TPACK is the basis of effective teaching with technology, requiring an understanding of the representation of concepts using technologies; pedagogical techniques that use technologies in constructive ways to teach content; knowledge of what makes concepts difficult or easy to learn and how technology can help redress some of the problems that students face; knowledge of students’ prior knowledge and theories of epistemology; and knowledge of how technologies can be used to build on existing knowledge to develop new epistemologies or strengthen old ones” (Koehler & Mishra, 2009)

Pedagogically speaking, the children felt motivated by the idea of becoming digital authors, and they were able to use the learned vocabulary meaningfully while creating the story, visualizing it and hearing it in the recorded narrative.

If we think of the SAMR model, this could be considered to be at the Redefinition level, since the use of technology allowed for a previously inconceivable task; the creation of the eBook was a completely new task and the students were fully involved and engaged in the project. In fact, they were the authors, whereas the teachers were merely facilitators.