Listen deeply; tell digital stories

I love sitting down to research something – a word, a thought, a lead – with my coffee by my side having no idea where this “lead” will take me, and ending up with eight awesome tabs at the top of my browser within ten minutes thanks to following links and Google searching.

I began researching “digital storytelling” with only a very basic understanding of what it actually was. I had no idea there was an entire “digital storytelling” world and ongoing conversation already in process… a world filled with digital storytelling festivals, digital storytelling nings, digital storytelling summer camps, digital clubhouse networks, digital storytelling companies and programs, tons of awesome digital storytelling examples and so much more! And yet, somehow, I’ve made it twelve years of primary education and three years of secondary education as an education major being completely unaware of the digital storytelling community surrounding me. Although I began researching digital storytelling to gain a basic understanding of the concept, and to discover some examples so that I could begin creating my own digital story for an educational technology class at Penn State University, my interest in this creative way of telling stories led me to learn and discover a whole lot more.

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The first thing you see before entering the Center for Digital Story Telling‘s main site is: 

The Center describes digital storytelling as this: “While the term “digital storytelling” has been used to describe a wide variety of new media practices, what best describes our approach is its emphasis on first-person narrative, meaningful workshop processes, and participatory production methods.”

“The Center for Digital Storytelling is an international not-for-profit community arts organization rooted in the craft of personal storytelling. We assist youth and adults around the world in using media tools to share, record, and value stories from their lives, in ways that promote artistic expression, health and well being, and justice.”

University of Houston has an entire site dedicated to digital storytelling. They describe digital storytelling as, “the practice of using computer-based tools to tell stories. As with traditional storytelling, most digital stories focus on a specific topic and contain a particular point of view. However, as the name implies, digital stories usually contain some mixture of computer-based images, text, recorded audio narration, video clips and/or music. Digital stories can vary in length, but most of the stories used in education typically last between two and ten minutes. The topics that are used in Digital Storytelling range from personal tales to the recounting of historical events, from exploring life in one’s own community to the search for life in other corners of the universe, and literally, everything in between.” Their website features an awesome video introduction to begin learning about digital storytelling. This introduction is not only useful for learning what digital storytelling is, but the many ways in which teachers can use digital storytelling technology to enhance learning in their classrooms is also immediately evident through this video. Found on the University’s site is also another definition of digital storytelling, given by British photographer, educator, and digital storyteller, Daniel Meadows. He defines digital stories as “short, personal multimedia tales told from the heart.” The University writes that Meadows goes on to describe digital stories as “multimedia sonnets from the people” in which “photographs discover the talkies, and the stories told assemble in the ether as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, a gaggle of invisible histories which, when viewed together, tell the bigger story of our time, the story that defines who we are.”

Under the tab “digital storytelling” on Daniel Meadows’ own website, he has some great examples of digital storytelling – I found his story Painted Skies especially awesome. This video alone got my creative juices flowing: Students could create digital stories about the meanings and/or significance of their name in their own lives and/or in history. Students could create digital stories on their heroes – telling the story of not only their own lives, but also their heroe’s life: their grandfather’s, their father’s, their sister’s – and with old pictures, or real images and video footage of their Grandfather’s war regalia, or real video footage of their mother tandem skydiving when she was twenty (which we have at my home).

Digitalstories.org defines digital storytelling as “the art of turning a personal narrative into a multimedia experience.  It can combine music, video and/or still images with your creative voice.  The results are an original production that engages the viewing audience in ways that are often surprising and powerful. Digital storytelling can be used to introduce or reinforce the power of writing.  Through the writing process and its refinement, students often discover the power of personal expression and greater creativity with digital tools at their aid.”

As I discovered, digital storytelling can be an exciting, educational form of multimedia. Creating digital stories could be a way for your own students to display their understanding of a topic, or as a way to show their comprehension of a combination of skills including but not limited to writing, reading, art, speaking, technology, poetry and being creative and forward-thinking. Because most, if not all, digital stories should have some form of “script” before being recorded, creating digital stories really does allow for that writing and refining process digitalstories.org discusses in the quote above.

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Several different digital storytelling websites and digital stories really caught my attention while I was doing my research, besides the ones already listed above. Stories for Change is an online meeting place for community digital storytelling facilitators and advocates. It features some awesome digital stories, resources, events, forums, news, and “featured stories.” The current feature story is entitled “Take A Walk in My Shoes,” and it’s a true story that was written for a class project by the storyteller, Jamaine Del-Rosario. “It uses spoken word and repetition of the phrase take a walk in my shoes, to emphasis his feelings of disappointment of having to move to a one bedroom apartment in the projects with his family of seven… The story includes both photos of his current housing development and himself, in order to help you put yourself in his place.” The repetition of the title/phrase throughout the story and the rhythm of Del-Rosario’s spoken word gives the story a very poetic feel. This story got me thinking about just how awesome it would be to have students put poetry to pictures and tell a story through verse in the digital story medium!

Lynne Zalesak is a Social Studies Teacher in Houston who uses digital storytelling to engage her students in the classroom. In her story below, found on YouTube, Zalesak explains in detail how she began working with computers and incorporating digital storytelling into her classroom, and how she feels it’s benefited her students. She says in her own story, “All kids love stories. They love to tell stories. They love to write stories. This is their chance to do that, and also get the curriculum in there… A lot of these kids have no idea just how creative they can be and how they can expressive themselves in different ways.”

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Lastly, through Stories for Change I found a Checklist for Completeing your Digital Story. This checklist added by Danielle Martin would be an awesome resource and guide for anyone looking to create a digital story, or for teachers to give to their students. Martin, who was the original Project Manager for the StoriesForChange.net site and is now a recent graduate of MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning with Master in City Planning program, breaks down the creative process of making a digital story into easy to understand bullets:

BASIC STEPS:

1. Brainstorm an IDEA for your Story
2. Write Script
3. Record Audio Narration
4. Storyboard
5. Collect Images
   1. Digital photos you take yourself
   2. Photo prints (that you need to digitize by using a scanner)
   3. Images from Web (copyright free, of course!)
   4. Artifacts (flyers, objects, etc you scan)
6. Manipulate images
   1. Get images to 720 by 480 pixels, 300 dpi, Landscape (4:3), and .jpg
   2. Adjust brightness, contrast, cropping or add effects
7. Find/create background MUSIC (again, copyright free)
8. Build/Edit your video file (using Windows Movie Maker)
9. Rough Cut (get some feedback from others)
10. Final Cut
11. Export (as DV/AVI for DVD and a web version)
12. Distribute (on DVD, on MySpace, and/or on StoriesForChange.net)

Teachers and/or technology

Although I initially created this blog to document my thoughts and findings for a Secondary English Education class at Penn  State University, it is quickly becoming my place to reflect, share, better develop my own beliefs and teaching philosophy, grow, and in many ways begin creating my own digital education portfolio.

One of the most valuable blogs in helping me to organize and develop my own views on education and technology has been The Thinking Stick. Education and technology – these are two subjects I’ve been reading an immense amount about lately – so much so, that I’m often left at the end of the day overwhelmed with snippets of thoughts, uncertain of what to blog or much less focus on thinking about.  This is where The Thinking Stick comes in – a recent post entitled “You mean the teacher still matters?” gave me some ideas to focus on, some more awesome links to check out, and most importantly, some fresh mental food to feed off of. Utecht’s post begins, “Four great articles have come to light lately that point to research being done and what many of us in the Ed Tech community have been saying for a long time might just be on the horizon. That is that this technology stuff can improve education.”

I’ll admit that at the end of this paragraph I started to get excited,  pulled my coffee mug close and prepared for a serious time-chunk of blogging. Then, off I went in search of more support, evidence and information to this idea – that “this technology stuff can improve education.”

“The Thinking Stick” featured a link to a Mashable post by Josh Catone entitled “What is the Future of Teaching?” where he wrote: “No longer is online learning just reading a module and answering questions — it can now include synchronous or asynchronous discussions and peer-to-peer learning exercises. As a result, online learning is becoming a more useful tool as both a replacement for and enhancement to traditional face-to-face learning.”

A similar point found in both of these posts is that while technology has the ability to enhance traditional learning, it does not have the ability to completely replace the teacher. Personally, this is a point that gives me hope; for as amazing as technology can be, I do not want my future ten year old child being educated from a screen everyday while sitting at home. In the conclusion to his post Catone writes, “Online education may never completely replace face-to-face learning, though as the Department of Education study shows, with enough time and under the guidance of a good teacher, online learning environments can produce results that are just as good or better than classroom learning. Online learning is likely to be used more often to enhance face-to-face learning in the future, however, and in communities where classroom learning is infeasible due to lack of funds, online learning is an adequate stand-in.”

Several weeks ago Will Richardson – owner of the blog Weblogg-ed, author of  Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, and “Learner in Chief” at Connective Learning – featured a post discussing the need to teach technology. His post featured a link to the 21st Century Collaborative blog by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach. Richardson writes of Beach, “One of my favorite things that Sheryl says when she talks about the challenges that schools face right now is that this generation of kids in our schools is the first not to have a choice about technology.” In his post Richardson features a powerful quote from a new Kaiser Foundation report entitled Daily Media Use Among Children and Teens Up Dramatically From Five Years Ago: “Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.”

Richardson closes his post by saying, “Right now, most schools are making what I think is a bad choice by not immersing their students into these online learning environments which are creating all sorts of opportunities for us to learn. In doing so, they’re implicitly saying that technology is an option. It’s not.”

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I’ll end this post with an interesting video I discovered through the Curriclum 2.0, New Literacy Wikispace. The Wikispace “Curriculum 2.0″ is a project created for schools and designed by teachers. The essential question to the Wikispace and the video is, “How does an information and technology curriculum stay relevant and meaningful in the 21st Century?” The video shows through a series of statements and facts the reasons why being able to answer this question is both important and necessary for educators and learners in the 21st Century.  It is a very interesting Wikispace – definitely worth checking out.