We’ve created digital storyboard Jamboard templates for teachers to adapt and use for blended learning. A storyboard offers a creative outlet for students (regardless of artistic prowess) to illustrate their understanding of narrative, sequencing, cause-and-effect, and/or audience interpretation, among many other benefits!
Template
Click here for a force-copy Jamboard that contains two templates:
- The first Jamboard asks students to illustrate (and provide textual justification/context for) six frames for a comic book.
- The second Jamboard asks students to illustrate six frames/scenes from a music video (or film). This template is also available in Spanish (click through to the third Jamboard).
Ideas for Implementation and Extension
- Storyboards can be used throughout lesson cycles. At the beginning of a unit, students might use inference skills to predict what might happen, based on their prior knowledge and experience. In the middle of a unit, students might use a storyboard as a brainstorming activity before starting a final assessment like a short story, for example. At the end of a unit, storyboards can help students demonstrate and reflect on their learning from a particular lesson.
- Teachers might pre-select the moment or scene for frames 1 and 6, and have students infer what may have happened between 1 and 6. For example, if a story or history book doesn’t explain how A led to Z, students might show what they know (based on context clues, research, and/or imagination, depending on teacher’s goals) in frames 2-5.
- Inspired by a program from CLI community arts partner organization Texas Music Partners, you might show students a video about composition and framing ahead of time, like the Rule of Thirds.
- In humanities classes, this activity could be used after a creative writing activity that uses different camera shots to have students tell the same story from different angles, as if the camera were the narrator or teller-of-the-story. First, describe and show different video shots like wide shot, mid shot, two-shot, over-the-shoulder shot, and/or a close-up. Learn about framing. Then ask students to write a scene. Consider:
- How would a story be written from a wide angle?
- How would a story be told from a close-up?
- What new or different details would you notice depending on the framing of the camera that is helping to “tell” the story visually?
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