Audio Visual sequence

The creation of an audio visual sequence or digital story is the most involved and complex element of the database.  That said it is not hard to do and it is the most powerful in terms of learning outcomes. Again there are many ways to tackle this and depending on the year level of your students a greater deree of sophistication might be expected. 

The sequence we are going to use is from the Wagaman pilot and was done by Sharde, who at the time was 8.5 years old and in year 4.  It focuses on the Spotted tree Monitor varanus scalaris, a small native monitor found in the school.

As the Biodiversity Schools project progressed students were all motivated and excited by the focus on wildlife around the school. One afternoon Sharde noticed a Spotted tree goanna on the wall of the school at home time and a photo was taken with a Mobile phone.

Sharde then began to ask questions and to do some research about the small monitors and we focused some discussion around it. This extended into a series of research and writing tasks which led to the basis of the storyboard and narration that were developed and recorded.

The story board was written out.  It contained the narration and suggestions for images to illustrate parts of the story. This took a good deal of effort and culminated in the production of the digital story that can then be attached to the Schools Biodiversity database system.

The narration was recorded as an audio file (on mobile phone) It took a number of tries before it was “up to scratch” according to the student.

The audio was then added to the video editing software ( in this case imovie) and the images were added to the video track in the appropriate position as dictated by the audio.  The file was the exported as a video file.

As these processes are repeated a range of complex skills are developed by the students and reinforced and the notion of building to shared knowledge system helps to keep the students motivated and on task but also to add to their knowledge and skills.

  • Writing
  • Reading
  • Research
  • Oral language
  • Images/ manipulation
  • creative thinking
  • Production skills
  • Digital Publishing skills/ awareness.

The process is a assignment with a digital story as output.  It can be done individually as in this case, or it can be group or even whole class based. You can do the full video production version if you want to.



A field Guide for Top End