Thoughts on teaching Digital Storytelling.
June 13, 2008
The last month of school I spent teaching/preparing students to create a digital story. This is my first full fledged attempt at Digital Story Telling. I have learned so much about the process. This has been one of the most involved learning experiences I have ever attempted with students. I am blown away by the power of the activity and the students’ response.
To begin with, digital story telling takes a lot of work. I had the students write rough scripts, then do research and search for photos or take photos with digital cameras. Then they revisited their scripts. They finally put all this together to create a story board. This alone took a lot of work, but was so valuable. The integration of skills going on here is intense. I asked students to write their scripts in a Moodle Journal. They quickly adapted to this word processor. Many students had color coded scripts and bulleted lists. When I taught them to keep a works cited they were to keep this in another Moodle Journal. Then, the students asked me to create another journal to keep track of the research they were doing! Along the way I gave mini-lessons on how to use search engines, copy and pasting links, copyright issues, importing and exporting to Moodle from home, file management, downloading photos from a camera, taking pictures, and many more. Remember, this is all before we have even opened PhotoStory3.
What has impressed me the most, and made an impact on me, is the student response. They were completely engrossed. My classroom management problems mostly went away, though a few new ones cropped up. (Get that Camera wrist strap on!) Students who before I had not been able to connect with I had engaging conversations with about their process, interests and ideas.
I have created a brainstorm map of all the skills and Ideas I could think of using bubble.us. Check it out below.
I teach in a Lab, and I have the students everyday for 45 minutes. I am rethinking the organization of my units. I am thinking that instead of a culminating activity I might try this to start with to teach all of these skills. It might take more time, but is definitely more authentic than the made up activities I have to teach them these skills independently. If I was in a classroom I think this would be a great way to use lab time during the first month or two of school. Once the students have all these skills there is so much more you could do with them the rest of the year.
