Instructional Digital Story Boarding...

So it hit me after catching up from a session I missed recently for our IT class that the process of digital story boarding was a perfect way to teach physical skills within Physical Education. If students can put together digital story boards for fictional and non fictional stories, then why shouldn't we use the same tool in Physical Education and get students to put together a digital story for teaching a specific skill?

Why would we do this?

• We all know that teaching a skill requires deeper knowledge of the skill
• By asking students to create an instructional 'digital story' we are requiring our students to understand the skill to a deeper level
• Creating videos for different skills can provide useful teaching tools in the future
  

Here's the rather simple process to create a digital story...

1. Decide on a particular skill to teach in the instructional story
2. Get the students to break the skill down into the key stages of the skill execution
   
3. The students will take photos of themselves at each of the key stages while executing the skill
4. Students will write an instructional narrative which explains the key teaching points for each stage of the skill
5. Upload the photos into iMovie and record the instructional sound track in time with the key stages
6. Export the instructional movie to You tube ready for the teacher to assess. If students have an eportfolio or if they blog you could have them embed the video into their blog so that you can use a reader to pull all the video's into one stream for quick and easy marking.
   

What we provide for our students is an opportunity to really understanding the principles behind the movement, the knowledge they gain from this process allows them to then effect change within their own technique and their peers. Depending on the age of the child this process could be more guided with the skills and stages already set out by the teacher.

We are soon beginning a Tennis unit where students have to analyse technique and break a skill into its parts, this will be the perfect chance for the students to show their understanding of a tennis skill through digital media.