The Story Workshop – An Evaluation Tool and Educational Resource

Muntean, L. Baciu, C., (2019), Atelierul poveştilor – instrument de evaluare şi resursă educaţională, , în Tehnologii Informatice şi de Comunicaţie în Domeniul Muzical, Vol. X, Nr. 1/2019, Editura MediaMusica a Academiei de Muzică „Gheorghe Dima”, Cluj-Napoca, print ISSN 2067-9408/ on-line ISSN 2069-654, tic.edituramediamusica.ro The Story Workshop – An Evaluation Tool and Educational Resource Abstract This article describes an educational project, an effective tool for the work of pre-service teachers for primary and preschool and analyzes it from the perspective of sound content in order to improve it. The paper is made up of four parts preceded by an Argument and ends with some Final Considerations. The first part, The Digital Stories - the theoretical foundation, synthesizes some theoretical ideas about the subject being treated. In the second part, The Story Workshop - the description of the educational project is presented with the concept of the working instrument. Part Three, Qualitative Analysis of Audio Content in the Story Workshop describes the study. In the fourth part, Sound Editing Programs, some examples of music software that can be used by students to enrich the content created with diverse sounds are described. Final considerations are not only the outcome of the study, but rather an intrigue for further steps. Keywords: The Story Workshop, Music Technologies, Student Assessment, Educational Resources. Introduction Stories have always had the power to make us float in a special way between real and fantastic. Classical, ancient or modern, current, they spring from human experience and are transmitted from generation to generation. Every story has as its starting point a grain of truth that is clothed with the most appealing coat. The essence of the stories therefore has a formativeeducational value, which produces effects especially when its presentation is well adapted. The current lifestyle does not change this state of facts, but makes changes to the way the stories are played and listened / watched. The image, the sound, the music considerably enrich the content of their ideas, and the technologies facilitate the realization of forms of syncretic art, attractive to the contemporary man, regardless of the age he / she has. In their initial training, primary and pre-school teachers acquire a range of technological skills that they can use not only in their effective work with children, but also in creating educational resources tailored to the educational needs of kids. In such a context, The Story Workshop was born. The Youtube Channel component - The Story Workshop is on the main page of the redirect to the youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIVpC6PMUrD_Fs_V3ddKqpQ . (Baciu, 2015, p. 26) It simultaneously fulfills the role of instrument for student assessment and educational resource for children. The animated cartoons distributed through The Story Workshop are the result of a creation exercise solved by students, using free softwares and applications that they have studied through their own efforts. 1. The digital stories – theoretics The Digital Story is a relatively new term that describes the phenomenon of using new media devices such as computers, mobile phones, digital recorders, digital cameras, digital cameras, and related programs (Roland, 2006), by which individuals or businesses share their story. The stories made using these digital electronic devices can vary, as content, from personal experiences, learning stories and messages for social justice, to historical and documentary anecdotes, and even to the sharing of some video reports in digital format. (Garrety & Schmidt, 2008) The fast development of information systems has led to the emergence of more and more digital equipment, such as digital cameras, smart phones, the extension of the use and interconnection of personal electronic computers to a set of computer networks, which subsequently formed world-wide network known as the Internet. Educational systems, in order to keep up with the current development needs of contemporary society and the knowledge society, are bound to integrate these new information and communication technologies into school to facilitate learning. (UNESCO, 2005, pp. 27-59) The Digital Story is a method of using digital equipment to support educational processes taking place at the level of education systems. (Robin, 2008) Looking from the perspective of educational sciences, we could say that the digital story is the art of using digital content to create and disseminate educational resources that combine a variety of elements of communication into a narrative structure. The main role of the digital story is to convey emotions (joy, surprise, fear, disgust, sadness). In the literature there are several definitions for the concept of digital storytelling, definitions in which the digital story is presented as the process of sharing stories / information by a storyteller with the help of multimedia resources and equipment. The graphical structure of these relationships is shown in figure 1. Figure nr. 1, The Digital stories – Components 2. The Story Workshop - Description of the educational project For the evaluation at computer-assisted training, students of the second year, from the specializations Pedagogy of Primary Education and Pedagogy (PIPP) and Pedagogy, Babeş-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, have the task to create educational resources for children, based on original stories and using programs video editing and images from the Internet. The cartoons created by them are published on the YouTube portal. Youtube Channel "The Story Workshop" was created in 2012 and has seen a continuous development in terms of both the products being advertised and the infrastructure. (Baciu, 2015, p. 26) Figure nr. 2, Channel "The Story Workshop" - Home Page The whole approach aims to respond to the educational needs of children and students and to be completed by making useful teaching materials, easily accessible and attractive. As working tools, students use all kind of devices and free software for audio, video and image editing. The stories for children are distributed through the youtube channel - The Story Workshop. It has some features by which: - products are ranked according to the number of views, - shows the duration of viewing, - the data for the different playback locations is indicated, - shows the dynamics of viewing times in different time frames, - shows average values of viewing time, - the extent to which the audience is preserved / maintained for years, - shows the extent to which the audience is maintained / interested on the project, - shows the evolution of the number of subscribers, by years, - the extent to which the products have been appreciated / unappreciated for years, - the extent to which products were valued / unappreciated, on projects etc. (Baciu, 2015, p. 28) The criteria for analyzing the evolution of the project are set in order to permanently improve the created and posted educational resources. For the same purpose, starting from the premise that music plays a very important role in children's lives, we consider it useful and necessary to analyze the extent to which the sound is a component part of the students' creations. 3. Qualitative analysis of the audio content in The Story Workshop The purpose of the animated stories created by students is primarily a formativeeducational, not an aesthetic, artistic one. However, the resulting products have to be exciting, captivating, so the children can enjoy them, even several times. In the case of children, any message accompanied by music greatly increases the chances of being quickly assimilated. That is why we are proposing a qualitative analysis of sounds that students use in their creations. The analysis focuses on the top 25 projects in youtube users' playlists at the time of the study. This is based on the observation method and uses as a tool an observation grid consisting of 13 items, grouped on the following indicators: the procent of the music, the place the music plays in the created cartoons, the way of capitalizing on the various sound effects, the musicality of the voice of the reader, the interdisciplinary, syncretic character of the product of creation. It should be noted from the beginning that, as to how music can be selected, processed and included in cartoons, any decision lies solely with the students. Until this stage of the creative approach, no recommendations have been made regarding the software recommended for sound editing. In the material analyzed, music is the most commonly used in the beginning and the end of the cartoon. In this case, the editing of the musical material is limited only to cropping it and attaching it to the basic content. When the music fragments run simultaneously with reading the story, the playback volume is smaller, keeping the appropriate proportions. In these situations, the fragments are taken from the classical musical literature or from the soundtrack of the cartoons with which children are already familiar. The sound effects are to a small extent present in students' creations. We refer here to different sounds that would naturally complement the read text, enhancing its expressiveness. We note that the effects selected by students imitate sounds from nature, but not other sounds resulting from hitting, colliding, falling, etc. In a small number of stories, we note that for a more suggestive illustration of the characters, students are processing their voice with the help of technologies. Thus, to represent delicate or charismatic characters, the voices are thin, to illustrate male characters or to signal the imminence of danger, the voices are bold, respectively to show the presence of the collective characters in the story, the voices are multiplied. Vocile cititorilor sunt melodioase, modulate corespunzător, fără să fie necesară editarea lor. The voices of the readers are melodious, appropriately modulated without the need to be edited. These are mostly recorded with the mobile phones. Although it emerges from reading that students have the vocal qualities necessary for working with primary and preschool children, none of them proposes any vocal singing intervention. The syncretic character of the cartoons made by students is primarily due to the fact that text is associated with a series of moving images. In the analyzed works, music is just a little valorized. Of the causes that cause this situation, we particularly draw attention to the following: - students' tendency to take account of age specificity more in the content of the story than in its form, - students' focus more on the creating process than on the product of creation, - the lack of an explicit orientation towards creating a soundtrack for cartoons, - little knowledge of softwares for music editing. At this stage of the study we consider it appropriate to present some free online programs that can be easily used by students to enrich the expressiveness of the created cartoons with various sounds. 4. Sound editing programs A user-friendly program is ocenaudio. This is a simple editor, suitable for voice editing, because it can’t perform multi-track sessions. Figure nr. 3, Ocenaudio For users who prefer to work online without downloading the software, hya-wave can be a good option. This is an audio publisher released in 2015 that allows you to copy, paste, crop your music, save it to Cloud, apply live effects, and share through social networks or URLs. Figure nr. 4. Hya-Wave For advanced users, soundation can be an attractive option. This online app allows you to simultaneously open multiple work channels and organize them well, making it more suitable for musical composition and making music arrangements than editing. Figure nr. 5, Soundation Final considerations The creation of digital stories by students is one of the didactic activities in which the concept of interdisciplinarity materializes successfully. Beyond creating a real collection of modern educational cartoons for primary and preschool children, there is also a community of pedagogues with digital competences corresponding to the times in which we live and with a new vision about education. Current technologies are an accessible and efficient working tool in any creative approach. Digital stories created by students can be done with free, easy-to-use software. Following the qualitative analysis of the audio content in the Story Workshop, we can say that it can be greatly enriched. Of course, there is a need for a minimal orientation of the creative students in this direction, namely to familiarize them with appropriate working tools, more precisely, with music editing softwares. This study opens up a different perspective in terms of new ways of approaching the creation process of cartoons for children.We believe that music is one of the resources that, appropriately exploited in the given context, bring a qualitative plus to the created material and keep the interest in viewing them even more times.