I found the article on Digital Storytelling, "The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling," to be very interesting and eye-opening in that I was previously unfamiliar with the idea of digital storytelling. After reading the article, I thought about how interactive and personalized digital storytelling could make learning for all students. I really like the idea that students can create their own stories and then publish them in a way which allows for each of their voices to be heard by many different people. I think that digital storytelling can also allow students to synthesize a wide variety of information. Once students have researched and come up with their own ideas and narratives, they must learn to put both together in order to create their own story. Synthesis can be a struggle for many students because it requires such metacognitive processes, but through the practice of digital storytelling, teachers can inadvertently teach students what it means to synthesize and present a wide range of learning.
I also found it interesting to think about the many types of literacies that digital storytelling can teach. The idea that digital storytelling can help students gain global literacy, technology literacy, visual literacy, and informational literacy really highlights the importance of it and the many ways it can be used to educate in the classroom. Still, as someone who is new to digital storytelling, while the idea of it seems amazing and extremely pertinent to student learning, I struggle with how to best use digital storytelling in my class and the technology skills and knowledge required to implement digital storytelling in the classroom.
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I can appreciate the seven elements guidelines for digital storytelling. Where I sub, the meat and potatoes of the curriculums are literacy developement. I do character study units where my students are somewhat engaged depending on the narrative. This media gives me additional ways to engage them, and bring them closer to getting to know the characters in the narratives.
ReplyDeleteI also feel that being able to use several genres could increase student engagement, especially for transitional and fluent readers as they are reading less predictable texts, where the words are someimes loaded with meaning that can help deepen the students understanding of the characters, and the text as a whole.
The concept of using this media for historical content is very interesting to me. My interest lies in adding this tool to my social studies units that include geography, land formations, and water behavior. Being able to add historical photographs, and authentic maps to our stories should prove very interesting. I also think about our students being able to build their own stories about their experiences with their families.