A VIDEO COMIC FOR GROUP SITUATED LEARNING IN THE CLASSROOM

Teachers can enhance students’ learning wiliness by involving drama roles in the classroom. With experiencing the process of drama performance, students can make situated learning and put themselves in the story of educational drama to absorb a variety of knowledge, which can help them learn more effectively. However, not every student can participate the existing educational drama we set in the classroom because of the time limitation. The unsatisfied part is that some students may not have the opportunity to practice and improve their learning. Group collaborative learning can solve this problem. Students with the high performance can help students with the low performance through their mutual dependence and common goals. However, due to the space limitation of a classroom, it is difficult to perform group education drama in the classroom. Besides, teachers are not easy to monitor the learning level of each group and identify personal performance by the group product and thus teachers cannot provide more complete assistance for each student.

In this paper, we introduce a new educational drama "digital video comic drama" for group collaborative learning. A video comic drama is a set of "freeze frame". The students can produce the drama by using a tablet computer with our developed software. Each student is assigned to produce a freeze frame in the group. All frame combined to form a video comic drama. Students can help each other and practice the instructional content repeatedly. The drama performance is recorded in a website so that they can do reflection learning by watching and discussion with other group performance in the classroom. Teachers can do individual tutorial by monitoring each group performance through the network.

We implement a software to support our approach. The approach is introduced and applied in a local primary school. We do some relevant experiment by sampling on English course of 60 fifth grade students for a year. 40% of the course topics used our approach. According to the interview with teachers and analyzing video record of the class, it improves the studying motivation of students in engaging the group learning activities significantly. Students with the poor performance can improve their learning performance by doing repeated practice, obtaining help from their group, and watching others performance. The teacher can also catch the learning status of students through the web system.