To view my story board of “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe click here

It amazes me at the number and variety of digital tools that are at our fingertips! Every day I am thinking of new ways to incorporate technology into my classroom and using these tools as a bridge to understanding text.

During my student teaching this past semester, we read Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” for our expository unit. Our key focuses were narrator tone, meaning, and cause and effect. We listened to the story on audible (in one class period) while the students followed along with their own copies of the story. Prior to reading this story, I gave my students a brief introduction to Edgar Allen Poe and his style of writing and we covered some potentially challenging vocabulary.

After the story, we had a discussion on the key focus points, and I was surprised that some of my students had trouble following the story. The most common questions the students asked were: Where are they? Why do they live together? Why did the evil eye bother the narrator so much? I admit I was anticipating some of these questions, but others (seemingly insignificant details to me) surprised me. It seemed that my students needed me to paint a picture for them.

At first, my intention was to create something for my students that would be a visual aid to help them follow the story line. I did not know that creating a storyboard would be considered a form of multimodality. The storyboard is similar to a comic strip and gives one the ability to visually bring the story to life. My story board for “The Tell-Tale Heart” is by no means a work of art (I’m sure most of my students could have done better), but it did make the breakdown of the story easier to follow and helped them to identify direct cause and effects.

Identifying direct causes and effects proved to be challenging for my students, many were confusing effects for causes and vice versa. So utilizing storyboard I had the students create their own. I had them identify a scene in the story. Once they had done that I had them fill in 3-6 blocks for their story board and a brief summary of what happened. After that I asked them to identify 1 point of action in their scene (this would be their cause) and then 1 thing that result from that action (this would be their effect).

The limitation to this tool is that the small details in the text can get lost. There are a limited number of options for images to incorporate and the “right” image may not be available. In order to have the old mans eye look creepy and glossed over I had to add a small blue circle over the character. I think that it served its purpose (the students knew who the character was in the story), but I doubt it evoked the emotion that Poe was trying to convey.

For this unit the storyboard proved to be an effective multimodal text, but that is not to say there isn’t something else that would work well with “The Tell-Tale Heart.” I think a fun alternative assignment is to have the students choose their own mutimodal text to bridge their understand to the original text. This would be a great way to foster creativity and incorporate differentiation.

I love the idea of having the students pair a song to the text, but what other mutimodal forms of text are out there?