Digital Storytelling in the Middle Childhood Special Education Classroom: A Teacher's Story of Adaptations

This article chronicles one special educator’s process of implementing adaptive instructional strategies in her middle school language arts classroom. Paige Michalski crafted adaptations for her students with disabilities in the curricular area of digital storytelling (Banaszewski, 2002; Dunn, 2000). Digital storytelling involves telling stories using multimedia technologies, providing a format for students to put their thoughts together, visually, aurally, and kinesthetically. Ms. Michalski has found that incorporating the process of digital storytelling into her special education language arts classroom produced numerous benefits. Students appeared to be excited about their projects and committed increased effort in writing and verbal communication. They proved they were able to generate projects, using multimedia software and computer technology. SUGGESTED CITATION: Banister S., Hodges D., & Michalski, P. (2005) Digital Storytelling in the Middle Childhood Special Education Classroom: A teacher’s story of adaptations. TEACHING Exceptional Children Plus, 1(4) Article 3. Retrieved [date] from http://escholarship.bc.edu/education/tecplus/vol1/iss4/3 Introduction Educators are teaching more diverse students and including more students with disabilities in general education classrooms (McLeskey, Henry, & Hodges, 1999). Teachers are finding that students have a much broader spectrum of skills and abilities. To meet the needs of all students, it is clear that the use of a variety of instructional and learning strategies must be included in the instructional process more efficiently and effectively than ever before. These instructional and learning strategies assist students who are considered gifted/talented as well as those who have a disability that affects learning and are designed to increase student achievement. This article chronicles one special educator’s process of implementing adaptive instructional strategies in her middle school language arts classroom. Paige Michalski crafted adaptations for her students with disabilities in the curricular area of digital storytelling (Banaszewski, 2002; Dunn, 2000). Digital storytelling involves telling stories using multimedia technologies, providing a format for students to put their thoughts together, visually, aurally, and kinesthetically. Evidence supports the notion that students can increase their reading and writing skills by incorporating multimedia technologies in this manner (Bagui, 1998). Because writing for students with disabilities can be laborious and frustrating, exploring alternatives that alleviate some of these stressors, while stimulating students to edit and revise, is vital (Bailey, 2000). Though digital storytelling has been employed in a growing number of general education classrooms (Lambert & Mullen, 2004), the curricular innovation has not been introduced to most inclusive or special education classrooms. Creative uses of computer technologies have been traditionally absent in these settings (Edyburn, 2000; Jeffs, Morrison, Messenheimer, Rizza, & Banister, 2003). The reason for this may be that the adaptations seem to be more extensive when teaching students with disabilities. (Holzberg, 1998; Leneway, Brinkley, Webb, & Harbaugh, 2002). These challenges highlight the need for research in special education classrooms where exemplary instruction and the integration of multimedia technologies is modeled. If teachers are to begin using multiple instructional strategies and curricular innovations, they need examples of best practices from their colleagues (Piper, 2000). Chronicling a peer’s experiences, as she implements a new approach in the classroom and sharing this evidence give teachers practical information. Ms. Michalski shares her successful implementation of digital storytelling, using several innovative and effective strategies to meet the needs of her students with low incidence disabilities. Developing a Vision and Plan for Digital Stories in the Classroom Ms. Michalski is a veteran teacher of 15 years. She has spent all of those years teaching language arts and social studies classes at a Midwestern, urban junior high school. Her commitment to this challenging environment is evidenced by her 15-year tenure. She comments that the most difficult aspect of teaching for her is the lack of resources. Spending her own money to purchase items needed for her classroom is a common occurrence. Ms. Michalski’s seventh and eighth grade students have been identified as cognitively delayed. One group has IQ’s averaging below 70, and the other group has IQ’s averaging below 55. Students participate in some general education classes such as fine arts, physical education, language arts and social studies. Others participate in a self-contained classroom with Ms. Michalski for language arts and social studies. The class sizes range from four to ten students in a class. Students spend two or three class periods, consecutively, in the self-contained classroom setting. Most of the students have been in Ms. Michalski’s classroom for more than one year. In addition to their cognitive challenges, 90% of the students at this school qualify for free or reduced lunch, documenting the impoverished status of most of the households in which these students live. It is not uncommon for students to have parents that are imprisoned or battling drug addictions. Some students have suffered physical or sexual abuses. Ms. Michalski, partnering with school and community support systems, works to teach the “whole child”, acknowledging their many needs, and providing opportunities to accommodate those needs in her classroom. Ms. Michalski was introduced to the concept of digital storytelling when a team from the Center for Digital Storytelling (Lambert & Mullen, 2004) in Berkeley, California (http://www.storycenter.org/desc.html) visited the school in January, 2004. The visitors worked directly with a small group of students and teachers in creating digital stories that combined written and recorded text with still images and music. Later, as a part of grant-funded professional development workshops in her school, Ms. Michalski was challenged to complete a lesson in her own classroom, instead of the computer lab, that integrated computer technology. This lesson had to address specific curricular goals, as well as a component of the National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers (NETS-T) (Kelly, 2002). She began to think about how she could provide her students with experiences in digital storytelling, comparable to those of the students in some of the general education classrooms. She brainstormed ideas with her colleagues in special education, and began to formulate a plan. The following paragraphs relate her experience, in her own words. Ms. Michalski’s Experience “Focusing on the topic of “My Life,” I challenged my students to think and write about people, places, and events that characterized their individual life experiences. I envisioned students bringing in pictures that correlated with their ideas, and creating two final products: 1) A PowerPoint slide show combining the pictures and written text 2) A digital video, with student narrations accompanying their photos I believed that the first of these products could be created by my students, in our own classroom, using the three student workstations. In order to complete the second, I would need one day in which students would have access to a small set of laptops and a coteacher, skilled in digital video software. Confident that my students could be successful in creating these digital stories, I began to implement this plan. Our first task was to ask student to bring in pictures from home that illustrated various parts of our selected table of contents for the PowerPoint slide shows, “My Home,” “My Pet,” “My Neighborhood,” and “My Favorite Room” were among these categories. Unfortunately, I immediately discovered that few of my students had access to family pictures. Growing up in an impoverished, urban environment is not always conducive to creating and saving family photos. Faced with our first roadblock, NO PICTURES, a fellow teacher and I requested departmental funds for disposable cameras (See Image 1). Once these were acquired, we sent them home with students and the students returned them for development. We had prints made of the photos and students were taught how to scan and name their pictures. This process took several weeks and then we were ready to experience PowerPoint!” Image 1: Request for Cameras ”Knowing that even taking a small group of students to the computer lab could be a daunting proposition, I drew up a list of tasks that students needed to complete to begin their digital story. The students were excited about learning a new piece of software. I had made a few demonstration slides for them to see, so they understood what they were making (See Image 2 & 3). The time in the lab was exhausting! Running from one student to the next, answering their questions, trying to figure out what they had clicked on, and working to get them to all save to my folder on the server kept me very busy”. Images 2 & 3: Sample Slides ”Reflecting on this experience, I created a modified task list, documenting some of my “teacher talk” (See Table 1). Table 1: Teacher Dialogue Power Point Students’ Computer Assignment Teacher Comments Hint: You may have to wear tennis shoes #1 – Open Microsoft PowerPoint “No not the blue W – you may need to go to start then programs then power point!” “Just Wait” #2 – Click on Blank Presentation “Then OK –it looks like a blank piece of paper” “Mr. Iffland” “Wait Chris!” #3 – Click on Title Slide “It has 2 bars – 1 long one and 1 short onethen click ok.” #4 – Type in your title and your name. “Snapshots of my Life” “Oops – I forgot to tell you to click in the top box and type your title, then click in the second box and type your title” “Oh no! Ms. Adams – we have to spell