KEEP OUR MEMORIES: ELEMENTARY SCHOOL STUDENTS CO-DESIGN GRADUATION ALBUM VIDEOS USING GOOGLE +

This paper describes an across-classroom participatory design. The students, as stakeholders, shared photos, participated in discussions and group-designed their graduation album videos using Google+ in a primary school. This design activity spanned over two and a half months, and data were collected from a number of sources, such as the content of the Google+ site, comments posted by the students, questionnaires and interviews. The findings indicated that this pioneering practice helps the students to develop various generic skills such as IT and design skills, collaboration skills, and organisational skills. The study also highlighted the students’ perspectives and the enhanced student responsibility and also demonstrated that the Google+ functionality has the potential to improve the students’ engagement and boost their design activity through their visible accomplishment. The conclusions reached by this study were that giving the students a dominant role in an across-classroom collaboration design activity using social networking can be useful for developing a diverse range of student capabilities and can play a significant role in their learning.