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..