Stop-motion to foster digital literacy in Elementary School

Abstract

Although digital media literacy is recognized as the essential competencies required for living in a new media age, it just starts to gain focus in Taiwan's elementary education. One of the reasons is examination-oriented education, with the result that diverts scarce resources away from this informal learning. The other reason is that educators tend to think digital media education as a series of purely technical operation, which might lead student digital media learning to mindless work. Therefore, this study designed a media exhibition based on Kolb's experiential learning model for teaching students concepts of stop-motion films and techniques of film production. A design experiment involved 247 third-grade elementary students that were grouped to visit the experiential exhibition. The findings suggest that the students have improved their knowledge of stop-motion films. Analysis of these produced films also shows that they have improved their media ability to represent their ideas and communicate with others. Through the analysis of the influence of demographics on the knowledge test, the findings revealed that the experiential exhibition is more effective for female elementary students and students' relevant previous experiences may not affect their acquired knowledge. Given those results and observations, we believe that the proposed experiential exhibition is a promising way to carry out digital media literacy education in elementary schools.Although digital media literacy is recognized as the essential competencies required for living in a new media age, it just starts to gain focus in Taiwan's elementary education. One of the reasons is examination-oriented education, with the result that diverts scarce resources away from this informal learning. The other reason is that educators tend to think digital media education as a series of purely technical operation, which might lead student digital media learning to mindless work. Therefore, this study designed a media exhibition based on Kolb's experiential learning model for teaching students concepts of stop-motion films and techniques of film production. A design experiment involved 247 third-grade elementary students that were grouped to visit the experiential exhibition. The findings suggest that the students have improved their knowledge of stop-motion films. Analysis of these produced films also shows that they have improved their media ability to represent their ideas and communicate with others. Through the analysis of the influence of demographics on the knowledge test, the findings revealed that the experiential exhibition is more effective for female elementary students and students' relevant previous experiences may not affect their acquired knowledge. Given those results and observations, we believe that the proposed experiential exhibition is a promising way to carry out digital media literacy education in elementary schools. A pesar de que la alfabetización digital en medios se reconoce como una de las competencias esenciales necesarias para vivir en una nueva era de los medios de comunicación, solo acaba de empezar a ganar atención en la educación primaria de Taiwán. Una de las razones es la educación orientada a los exámenes, y como consecuencia, el que se desvíe muy pocos recursos para este aprendizaje informal. La otra razón es que los educadores tienden a pensar en la educación en medios digitales como una serie de operaciones puramente técnicas, lo que podría llevar a los estudiantes de medios digitales a aprender a trabajar sin sentido. Por lo tanto, este estudio diseñó una exhibición de contenidos basada en el modelo de aprendizaje experiencial de Kolb con el fin de enseñar a los estudiantes conceptos de videos stop-motion y técnicas de producción cinematográfica. El experimento diseñado involucró a 247 estudiantes de tercer grado de primaria que fueron agrupados para visitar la exposición experiencial. Los hallazgos sugieren una mejora en los estudiantes de su conocimiento de videos stop-motion. El análisis de los vídeos producidos también muestra que han mejorado su capacidad mediática para representar sus ideas y comunicarse con los demás. A través del análisis de la influencia de la demografía en la prueba de conocimiento, los hallazgos revelan que la exposición experiencial es más efectiva para los estudiantes de primaria femeninos, y que las experiencias anteriores relevantes de los estudiantes no deberían afectar a los conocimientos adquiridos. Teniendo en cuenta estos resultados y observaciones, creemos que la exposición experimental propuesta es una forma prometedora de llevar a cabo la educación en alfabetización digital en las escuelas primarias.