Once Upon a Screen: Digital Story Illustrations

This lesson was a bit of a challenge to begin with since I had never personally used ScratchJr and previously had only ever made two projects with scratch itself. It was a bit of a learning curve but once i figured out how it worked I really enjoyed it. I believe that this lesson did not need this to be a success but judging by how well my students liked it I would say it was a definite benefit. My students had never used ScratchJr before so I was a bit nervous on how that would work but overall it was not too challenging. I believe that using ScratchJr benefited this activity tremendously because my students who normally cannot recall details from a story were talking up a storm and answer all the questions correctly.

1. This activity aligned well with my intended standards because students were able to use digital fabrication to tell me all about the story they had read. This aligned with the standard of identifying characters, setting, and events in a story. It also aligned with students being able to explain how illustrations help tell a story. I think to strengthen this alignment I would ask students to only illustrate one main event in the story so that they had time to add more details and allowed them to create more movement and conversation in their stories on ScratchJr.
2. In this assignment I had to take into considering the fact that my students had never used ScratchJr before so I introduced an easy standard like identifying characters and setting with a technical aspect they had never used before. I knew that if I gave the students this assignment that it would need to be completed in small groups so that I could guide them through how to use ScratchJr and to my surprise the students were great and loved it.
3. The supports that I provided my students was a story map that allowed students to write out their thoughts before diving into ScratchJr, I also provided students with visual examples of how to do things, and I provided them with hands on support. These supports allowed my students to generate their ideas before transferring them to the iPad, it also allowed my students to go at a slower pace. I grouped my small group students based on their abilities in working with electronics and this allowed me to pace my lesson depending on the group I was with. I also allowed students to use the talk-to-text feature to create dialogue for their sprites that were not confident in their spelling ability.
4. In order to support diverse learner needs I would create some premade “code” for the sprites so that students that struggles coding their sprites could focus on their characters and setting and then use the talk-to-text feature to tell their story.