Abstract:

This paper focuses on a new adaptive digital storytelling environment that has been created in order to help teachers to investigate and treat students’ misconceptions regarding various learning subjects. The environment comprises of an intelligent concept mapping tool that can be used for the diagnosis of students’ misconceptions regarding a specific learning concept and their treatment using appropriate digital stories. In fact, teachers, can use this concept mapping tool to create a detailed digital concept map of the learning concept in question. Teachers can also design a closed-ended interactive questionnaire that could be attached to each of its nodes. This questionnaire could be used for the evaluation of students’ knowledge about every sub-concept included in the aforementioned concept map. In this way, the misconceptions of every student and the whole class could be displayed. Thus, the system provides the possibility for adaptive personalized feedback for every student and for the whole class. The environment provides also a digital story tool for the creation of rich multimedia digital stories combining various multimedia files (text, sound, photos & video). Teachers can use this digital story tool to create appropriate stories for the treatment of students’ misconceptions which were diagnosed through the questionnaire. Then, these stories could be attached to the nodes of the aforementioned concept map and the system can automatically assign the appropriate stories to each student to help her/him overcome his/her misconceptions. An example of the use of our adaptive digital storytelling environment will be demonstrated.

Keywords:

Educational digital storytelling, Concept maps, misconceptions, adaptation, constructivism.