EDUC 630 - DB 4 Using Storyboarding for Learning

A story board is one step in the process of building a presentation.  It is not a process that every student is ready or able to use.  Thorsen (2009) affirms this by stating, “Young students, or students who are just beginning to learn how to write hyper-media presentations, will not be able to respond to every design principle.”  As a result, teachers may need to dedicate extra time to help younger or inexperienced students to develop their skills.  This may be but a minor hurdle to overcome but could be beneficial for the students in the long run.   Storyboarding allows the student to assemble information using graphically.  This aids in linking concepts and identifying their associations.  Students who are more visual learners may begin to grasp those concepts quicker enabling them to more readily translate what they have learned into a written format. 

            I remember using a similar tactic when I was in elementary school to help us learn about sentence structure.  It was called diagraming a sentence.  We would write a sentence and then create a graphic representation of the sentence which placed each word in a specific location on the graphic according to its purpose.  Nouns, verbs, adverbs…all had their proper place.  It seemed to help me understand the importance of each word and its function in a properly written sentence.  Consider the old Schoolhouse Rock cartoons which came on Saturday morning television.  In their own way, these were very advanced storyboards which were intended to help teach children concepts related to math, grammar, and government.  Not only were they graphic representations of concepts, the explanation of the concepts were set to music.  If you have ever seen these cartoons, you may just remember how a bill becomes law, why the number three is the magic number, or the function of a conjunction.  Think about how those cartoons, moving storyboards, help you to understand the concepts they were trying to teach.

References

Thorsen, C. (2009). TechTactics: Technology for Teachers (3 ed.). Boston: Pearson