Li'l Blog by Anke Stohlmann

The second challenge of the Smart Pitch Challenge 2015 was due this week—a 1-minute pitch video. Please check it out on YouTube and like it: https://youtu.be/LaCU4o7im5Y

The site has turned into a huge project: it is not only helping me figure out how to talk about the project and the instructions and tips, but also what the overarching look & feel for Li’l Stories is going to be. I’m exploring a design language of hand drawn elements with a more technical chart look making it scholarly and playful at the same time.

Jason Santa Maria’s advise: “remove all the clutter”. The key to a successful site is to edit it down, to simplify and to only show the relevant parts where they are needed. So no submenus, as it should be clear what content the user will find in a section. On the homepage, no unnecessary text or buttons, if it is explained in more detailed in the respective section. For example, for the homepage, Jason recommended to remove any content below the chart and to focus on the essence of the information.

As part of the Smart Pitch Challenge 2015, I had the opportunity to participate in a hackathon using Bubble, a platform to create web and mobile apps without code. As I knew I wouldn’t be able to learn enough to code the site by myself, this seemed like a great opportunity to have a working site.

I’d describe it as Scratch for adults: it was easy to quickly establish the structure of the site, to create the home page and link between pages. I however got stuck on creating the private gallery page and the intricate log ins for teachers and parents. Even though I was able to figure out the sign up, I wasn’t able to take it further. So for now I have abandoned this part of the project. My new plan is to show a sample gallery page, which will be enough to demonstrate the flow within the framework.

In the Smart Pitch Challenge 2015, organized by the CUNY Institute for Virtual enterprise, students from the New York area compete in four different tracks—education, healthcare, sustainability and smarter cities—for the chance to pitch their business idea. There are three milestones: a business plan, a 1-minute pitch video and a slide presentation. Nga Nguyen, a fellow IxD student, and I spontaneously decided to participate. Here is my business canvas:

The site, the third component in the framework has been slowly developing. It has to do two things: 1. Introduce teachers to the framework, make it easy for them to onboard, give them resources, free storyboard downloads and getting started tips on implementing the framework in their classroom 2. A place to share the students’ stories. The class gallery needs to have two different views: the teacher view, where they can upload and edit content and the student/parent view who can only download a story.

The big question is how should the student work be represented—here I’m exploring a typical gallery view and then a story box by story box view when viewing an individual story.

Site map

Wireframe: Home page explorations

Wireframe: Class Gallery

Last week I had the opportunity to meet with Jason Santa Maria, an old friend from my times on the board of AIGA/NY and a fantastic graphic and web designer. His advise: “no more than two things on a screen and 1 prominent thing”. He also suggested to overlay the instructions instead of having them be on a separate screen than the action screens (taking a photo / recording the story).

My fellow classmates helped me streamline the app even further by taking up the case for my target user “Do you really need them to record the title and name, can’t the teacher type it later?” What a great question, I have been so concerned about not adding tasks for the teacher that I didn’t see how this was making it more complicated for the kids. So now the app is truly a simple two-step process: http://invis.io/ZV2QUN9JP

Thanks Jason and IxD class of 2015!

Magnus Sweger, a 2/3 teacher at PS 3, opened his classroom to test the Li’l Stories framework. He completely embraced the spirit of storyboarding and storytelling and did a fantastic job facilitating it. He even expanded on it by turning the writing part into readers theater, a natural extension. He was able to simultaneously inspire and engage his students. See my earlier post Team 405: Storyboarding, storytelling, writing and readers theater to find out more about the test itself and the final out come in the post Team 405: A storytelling publishing party.

This week we had a chance to sit down and discuss the experience and the framework in more detail: • Magnus talked about how surprised he was that storyboarding can generate writing as it frees kids up. He mentioned two of his students, who usually struggle with writing and have a hard time putting words on paper. Both of them, however, excelled at storyboarding and afterwards were able to write an amazing story. He said: “ Sometimes one has to take a step back to take two steps forward.” • He mentioned that he often encounters resistance to writing, but there was no resistance to storyboarding. The students loved it and were very engaged. • He thought it was a great pre-writing activity. It helps students with the structure of their stories and organizes their thinking. The three starting story elements (inputs) encourage the students think about their story first. • He acknowledged how important storytelling is and how we so often focus on the reading & writing and forget about speaking & listening. • Magnus thought that storytelling was a great way for students to get over their shyness and practice public speaking. As the students have the visual storyboard in front of them, they can focus on it and thus don’t get stuck on the words. • He liked that oral storytelling changed the dynamic of the classroom. Usually only good writers are good storytellers, but now other students excelled as well. • Magnus liked the modality of the system and that one could easily add panels and post-its to a story.

• He also liked the pre-prepared post-its with images and said they worked really well for some students. I had initially created them as story element inputs (character and setting), but he said the students used them throughout a story as well and created brand new stories with them. • He acknowledged the pitfalls of some students spending too much time on the drawing, but at the same time thought this could be managed.

On Thursday Team 405, a 2/3 class at the elementary school PS 3, had their publishing party to wrap up their pourquoi tale unit. They had been working on this writing unit for the past 6 weeks. Magnus Sweger, Team 405’s teacher had used my thesis framework Li’l Stories as part of this unit to have the students either retell a pourquoi tale they read in class or create their own pourquoi tales. During these six weeks the students storyboarded, told lots of stories and wrote readers theater dialogues. Read more about the unit in my earlier post Team 405: Storyboarding, storytelling, writing and readers theater

The parents came to the publishing party and each student or student group told their story with the story board in front of them. One could tell they had practiced a lot. Usually students are very shy when having to present their projects in front of the class and parents, but not this time. Everyone was eager to present–there was a lot of laughter, when the students made the different voices of their stories. And parents very much enjoyed the experience.

This week I had the chance to use test with Apri and Izzy, two 3rd graders in Team 405, a 2/3 class at PS3. The two had created the pourquoi tale “Fish are swimming”.

We met during their lunch and recess time and they tested the app—first with the SuperNote app to actually capture their story in image and audio, and then pretend capturing the story with my app. This was also good storytelling practice for them, as they had a storytelling publishing party the following day.

They had fun with the activity and seemed very familiar with handling the phone. They thought the app was easy to use and the instructions were very clear.

I had streamlined the audio recording section further: before it was three audio takes, but this time I had them record it all together, using instructions in the app to remind them to start with the title and their names before telling the story. (latest version: http://invis.io/DZ2LM0Y6W)

They definitely enjoyed the story capture experience with the Li’l Stories app a lot more than with the SuperNote app—there were no instructions in the SuperNote app and they weren’t sure how to use it. The steps were however very clear for them in the Li’l Stories app.

This was an exciting week for Team 405, a 2/3 class at PS3. They not only created their own American Indian pourquoi tales, but also learned how to storyboard, edit, tell stories and turn their stories into readers theater. Charly, Team 406’s teacher, introduced me to Magnus Sweger, Team 405’s teacher. He had heard about my thesis project and wanted to see, if he could integrate it into his classroom. His class is studying American Indians and he had just started the American Indian pourquoi story unit. We met last week and devised a 3-part storytelling activity with the learning goal for the students to 1. understand the structure of pourquoi tales and 2. show this understanding through retelling and creating of pourquoi stories. Our plan:

Tuesday: retell the rainbow crow story (45 minutes) Wednesday: create your own pourquoi story (45 minutes) Thursday: edit your pourquoi tale and add words (45 minutes)

However the week unfolded very differently and I’m in awe of Magnus and the students and what they were able to achieve in such a short time. Magnus used the visual storytelling framework to create an amazing pourquoi tale unit, modeling and facilitating throughout and thus showing me the possibilities of the framework and its flexibility.

Monday Long story short, Magnus was so inspired by the idea of storyboarding that he started the unit on Monday, a day early. At that point he didn’t have any materials, so used what he had in the classroom: brown construction paper and 3 x 3 post-its.

Tuesday By the time I arrived on Tuesday, the students were well into creating their stories. Magnus had modeled the story board structure and story input elements on a large sheet of paper. Above, on the left, you can see the way Magnus had initially introduced the structure of a pourquoi tale (8 written paragraphs) and how he introduced it with my visual framework (8 visual story boxes with an intro summary of main character, setting and plot). Many kids wanted to directly create their own pourquoi tale, so instead of two activities (1 retelling activity + 1 creation activity) Magnus decided to give the students the choice to either retell one of the stories he had read to them or create their own story. He also gave them the choice to create a story collaboratively or individually—about 2/3 of the students chose to work in a group.

Those own creations were hilarious and really showed the students understanding of pourquoi stories and their structure—I truly believe that by creating their own story a much deeper understanding and learning was achieved:

• Why fish are swimming • How cats got their whiskers • How the fox got red fur • How ducks turned yellow

In the last 20 minutes of this class, Magnus modeled storytelling. He wrote story beginnings and other transition words onto the board and told the story he had modeled the day before. Then it was the students’ turn. Two groups presented—pointing to the story boxes while telling the story.

Wednesday On Wednesday the students continued creating their stories. Magnus started the class with modeling how to edit and revise a story. He again used his story for this and talked about how, based on comments from yesterday, he needed to add a scene (post-it) at the beginning to make the story clearer. 2 more groups presenting their stories at the beginning and another 2 groups at the end of class—they received feedback from their friends and knew where they needed to clarify or make changes to their stories.

This really emphasized the benefit of oral storytelling: the students could quickly tell their story and learn where they needed to clarify or alter their story without having spend a lot of time on actually writing the story.

After class we had a recap and decided that it would be good for the students to write their stories the next day. Magnus emailed me in the evening that he had come up with a perfect outcome for this unit: readers theater. The kids would write the dialogue of their characters and would then read their dialogue to the class with expressive voices. I was ecstatic—this was the perfect outcome. The students would continue their collaborations and each students would play one of the characters in the story—usually a narrator, main character and depending on the story another 1-3 other characters. Students that had worked on their own would need to solicit friends to help them perform their stories.

Thursday On Thursday, Magnus started with handing out a readers theater pourquoi tale (how the dog got his wet nose) and they narrated/played out the story with different kids taking on the different characters of the story. Then they went back into groups and started writing their stories. The class ended with Magnus reading 3 of the pourquoi tales the students had created. They will continue to fine-tune their stories next week and present them to their parents during a publishing party before spring break.

Learnings By improvising and not using the materials I had prepared the learnings of this test were tremendous: • Any teacher can do this with the materials they have in the classroom. This proves that this is a framework that is flexible.

• The concept—using visual storyboarding to deepen understanding of story structure and teaching soft skills like collaboration—works. The image above shows how Magnus usually teaches story structure compared to the visual storytelling method he deployed for this unit. • The framework can be used in different way and kids can have a choice: 1. retell or create their own story, 2. work in a group or alone. • It works as the starting point for a longer unit with flexible outcomes (published book, oral storytelling event, performance). The readers theater feels like a natural extension as it fosters writing, collaboration, and oral storytelling.

• It seems that kids intuitively arrange the post-its in a circle—the student above chose to go in a circle even though Magnus modeled a zig-zag path. The circular arrangement, however, is more of an unplanned path: you switch directions when you can’t go any further/have no more space to put another post-it. • Modeling/facilitation is key. It’s a great way to quickly get the students on board and understand a concept and task ahead. As instructions are modeled and visible on the white board, it eliminates the need for instructions on the activity board itself and the kids can use the space for notes. • Collaboration needs some structure: One of the groups in the class almost got derailed because they were fighting over who had drawn on more post-its. With 30 kids in a class, it is hard to monitor things like this, and it becomes vital to add some structure. When working with Team 211, a 1st grade class last year, I had learned that collaboration needs to be facilitated if a group has more then 2 members. It is important for each kid to be assigned to a story box and be responsible for it. • Constraints are good: one group wasn’t able able to start the writing part as they continued expanding their story. Limiting the number of story boxes/post-its is important to keep a project on track. • Magnus had turned the pourquoi tales into 8 story boxes … I’m wondering, if this is true for other stories as well. In addition, most kids had used around 6-9 post-its. I have been using 9 boxes (3 beginning, 3 middle, 3 end). I need to investigate this further to determine what the ideal number of story boxes is for this age range. • I also learned that having the kids use markers and smaller post-its (2 x 2) is a good thing as it encourages quick sketches and doesn’t really allow for detailed drawings. The drawings are meant to be visual notes and not perfect and detailed drawings—we saw that a couple groups spend a lot of time finessing their drawings instead of starting with the writing part.

Two topics keep coming up in my meetings with Paul Ford, my thesis advisor: data flow and security in regards to security of data.

Data Flow: analog vs digital First I looked at the current data flow in a classroom between teacher, student and parent to see where digital could come in and improve the interactions. 

Communication Teachers and parents are connected through email or if teachers only use this as a “getting messages out” channel like in Luna’s current classroom then the only channel for daily communication is backpack mail (paper message in child’s folder). In-person exchanges can happen at drop off and pick up or at parent-teacher conferences (3 times a year).

Work in school Usually parents are quite disconnected from life in the classroom. They can volunteer and be chaperones on class trips, but are usually not involved in the daily activities. Their connection to what happens in school is their child and the marked up work they bring home. These conversations however can be less fruitful, when a child’s answer to the question “How was school?” or “What did you do in class today?” is “Nothing.”, “The usual.” or other one sentence answers. The work they bring home was usually done a few works earlier, so there is no immediate connecting to the daily activities either.

The data map above, shows the advantages of digital: it can connect teacher, parents and students more frequently, it can be used to trigger conversations about school, and for my project in particular, it can be used to share group work that would otherwise only be displayed in the classroom or go home with one of the children at the end of the year or curriculum unit. Digital adds additional possible connecting points.

Data Flow: inputs and outputs

Then there are the input and output activities in a project. Mapping out the digital experience made it clear that the student’s activities should focus on the inputs: creating a story and documenting it through taking a photo of the story and recording the telling of the story.

The data output for the digital activity is for the documented story to be viewable in an online classroom gallery. This gallery can then connect the network of teacher, parent and student and allow for learning, sharing, additional writing and storytelling activities. It also opens the door to peer-to-peer learning at home—learning from the stories other students have created.

Based on my learnings from talking with Elise Lemle and Eric Forman and testing the first app prototype with Luna and the app SuperNote—offers note taking in form of text, photos and audio—with a group of 7 year olds, this second prototype of the app is very simple and linear in its interactions. There are two basic activities: 1. take photo and 2. record title, names of creators, and story.

It’s a step by step process with instructions before each step and appraisal after each step. I envision these instructions to be in handwriting and have a casual tone. Here is a link to a clickable prototype created in Invision: http://invis.io/SM2GT6YR4

The purpose of the app is for a group of students or an individual student to document their story through images and audio. At the end of the documentation, the story (image + audio) is saved onto the device and uploaded to the class gallery. An email alert is simultaneously send to the teacher to approve the story before it is visible in the gallery.

All interactions beyond the photo taking and audio recording—the individual story box format, uploading and email for example—happen automatically in the background. The students are only responsible for the “data input”.

Students can do two things in the app: 1. document a story and 2. view their class gallery.

This past Saturday I had the opportunity to test the physical and digital activity together: my friend Jessica Hemlin organized a “storytelling playdate” with her daughter Maggie and three of her friends—all 2nd graders at PS 261 in Brooklyn.

I created two groups and started out by modeling the storyboard: together we created a story about Harry Potter. Then it was the girls’ turn—they continued the Harry Potter theme: Maggie and Novelle told the story of “The Adventures of Harry Potter” and Bayan and Isabel of “The Gringotts Castle”.

Then I asked each group to document their stories by first taking a photo and then recording the telling of it. Maggie and Novelle chose to tell the story together, while Maggie was holding the phone. Bayan and Isabel decided for Isabel to tell the story and Bayan to be the documenter. But Bayan chipped in when Isabel got stuck.

I used the app SuperNote to simulate the digital activity. It offers note/memo taking in form of text, photos and audio that can be emailed or uploaded to dropbox. Taking the photo was no problem for either group, the audio was a little tricker, but that was due to the fact that the audio button was small in the top corner and hard to see.

Learnings • 6-8 year olds can take photos and audio. Most of them have taken a photo with a parent’s phone before. Recording audio can also quickly be learned. • The interactions need to be simple and clear—large buttons to tap, clear understanding of what tapping will do. • The girls were excited to hold the phone. After recording they insisted on replaying and listening to their stories.

Continuing with the development of the digital activity of the framework, I needed to take a step back and clarify what the goal of the app is. Luna’s comment about it being not that exciting, made me wonder, if I needed to add functionality like making a story on the phone. While this is interesting, it is not an activity of the classroom, but rather an in-home activity. I could see it as a premium feature for parents that can be added in a 2.0 version. In conclusion the app for the classroom is a digital tool for elementary school children to document through images and audio the story they created together. It will continue the overarching goal of fostering collaboration—one student takes on the role of the storyteller while the other has the role of the documenter—and learning 21st century skills. It’s a first introduction to using digital tools to make a physical artifact digital,tell stories digitally, and to then share them. The sharing will happen in a private and save space: a password protected online classroom gallery.

Through testing with Luna and discussions with several friends and colleagues, specifically Elise Lemle, who has the unique perspective of having been an elementary school teacher and is now working as a designer and strategist for TwoBitCircus, and my thesis teacher Eric Forman, it became clear that I needed to further simplify the app and make it a step by step process.

Introduction

Luna’s comment “I read it but then forgot about it” indicates that there needs to be an introduction to each step instead of an introduction at the beginning. It’ll remind the kids of what to do. Another option would be to have a video as an introduction, but this could also live in the instruction section.

Type: title and story creators

I realized that even if the kids know how to type, it would take a long time. Instead it would be better to just record these elements. In the step by step process the students would be asked to do 3 records: 1. title, 2. creators, 3. story. These 3 audio recordings could then be listened to as one audio piece (playlist). In addition one could take advantage of speech recognition (Siri) and have 1 and 2 be turned into text. Any discrepancies or mistakes in the text could be fixed by the teacher when approving a story submission.

Photo: is the goal to assess or share

At the moment I gave the kids the choice to choose not only how they wanted to shoot the photo (whole board or focus on story boxes) but also how the story boxes would be arranged—this is way to complicated. It’s however a tricky decision and depends on what the ultimate goal is: if used as an assessment tool, the teacher will need an image of the whole board. If the goal is to share, then a story box arrangement is better. Could there be both?

Elise’s take on it was that the kids would ultimately be interested in the story boxes and the visual story and would want to see it without the writing. This makes sense as the writing will be notes about the story but not necessarily full sentences.

Storybox layout

I had several interesting discussions about the story box layout. Should one see all the story boxes at once or just one story box at a time. Eric saw it as an array of images, which could be displayed in different ways—in a row, grid or spiral layout. The question however is what would be the best way to consume the story: • whole story • story boxes in a row, showing 1, 3, or all of them depending on the size of the screen • individual story boxes, enabling to view them as large as possible on a screen

Animated storybook Could the story be an animated storybook—it’s simplest iteration being that the viewer would swipe or click to the next set of images. Or could it be a video, that instead of recording the story, the student would make a video of each story box while their friend would tell the story. Or could the array of images be recorded in a sequence (the length of each image being on screen) in sync with the recording— could for example the documenter swipe from image to image whenever the storyteller is done with a story box? Or should actually each story box be photographed and recorded separately?

This week Eric Forman, our thesis teacher this semester, tried a new feedback format with the goal to hone in on our ”elevator pitches” and to get rapid feedback from our fellow students: each of us had to present a summary of our thesis in 1 sentence, an update on our prototype in 1 sentence, and our learnings from our user test in 1 sentence. The 1 sentence rule was quite hard, but a great exercise.

Summary Li’l Stories is a visual storytelling framework for elementary school teachers to foster abstract thinking and collaboration through visual, oral, and written storytelling.

Prototype Update My thesis consists of 3 components that are in different stages: My physical prototype is almost finished and ready to be implemented. I have a clickable app created in InVision that I will test this weekend with a group of 6-7 year olds. I’ve started to work on a site map for the site, figuring out necessary features and functionality.

Learnings I learned from testing with Luna that the app by itself is not “that exciting”, but works well in conjunction with the physical story creation activity.

After each presentation we had to give feedback by writing on three small pieces of paper: • the most important question we thought the person needed to answer • the minimum viable product (MVP) for thesis and • what next step we thought the person should take

Here is some the feedback I received:

Question • How do you measure success or improved thinking? Can you prove to DOE this improves outcomes? Can you prove this approach is better than current education frameworks? • Can this product be used to teach children with disabilities? Or is it for storytelling only? • How easy is it for teacher to implement this in their program? How can they learn or see the benefit or if it is successful? • What is the most accessible way of integrating this into the current education field? • Is this only for classrooms? Can it be used in the home? • Is there a way to make the app stand alone too? (learning how to construct stories through drag and drop? • How can the physical storytelling and digital app flow smoothly and dominating part be more fun? • Does the product evolve with the user?

MVP • Working prototype and metrics for measurement • Working prototype and a video about the story (how it is used) • An open source framework that can be easily distributed and used in any classroom • Demonstrate the engagement component of user (kids) with your product and end result • Toolkit: physical board and Facebook community to share the pictures and the story • Board + documentation system with existing apps (Instagram, etc.)

Emily Collins, the teacher of Girl Stories—a free program for girls ages 12-15, who are interested in telling their stories through filmmaking, animation, and comics—and I have bonded over storytelling and she has been a wonderful resource for this thesis. Last week she opened her classroom to testing some of my thesis concepts: She tested with her Girl Stories’ class the acrylic storyboards for older kids. When I originally showed her the boards, she was intrigued by them and thought the girls would like them when brainstorming and planning their animations. The girls were working on a collaborative “I remember …” poem, consisting of 12 sentences with each girl contributing one “I remember …” line. The final product is going to be an animation of the poem.

Emily started out by modeling on a white board how to use the acrylic boards. Then the girls teamed up in groups of 2-3 students. They used the boards to plan their scenes and materials and used the story box for a sketch and the lines for notes. They worked with wet-erase markers to make sure their plans wouldn’t easily wipe off when moving around and creating their scenes.

Emily loved the boards—she thought it made the planning very easy and she was surprised how quickly the girls were able to create their animations. As they were sketching with markers they were less tempted to draw details, but really just sketch out their idea for each scene. The girls liked the sturdiness of the boards—it was a tool to help them brainstorm their animations.