Digital Storytelling in the Classroom - Article #1

Overview:

In the 5th chapter of his book, Digital Storytelling in the Classroom, Dr. Jason Ohler talks about stories. In Chapter 5, Dr. Ohler does not just talk about stories, he focuses on the usefulness of "the story core" and "story mapping" in particular. Dr. Ohler's main inspiration for the story core and story map outlines in this chapter is Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, though he laudably also mentions the many other story archetypes out there! He relates that the purpose of creating a story core when embarking on a Digital Storytelling event is to identify the essential narrative elements. This makes it much easier to see the main thrust and worth of your story. On a related note, the main purpose of story mapping is basically to identify the compelling elements of your story in more detail - a specific graphic tool given is the "Visual Portrayal of a Story," or VPS, which has a "beginning, middle, and end" just like they always told us to strive for in grade school, albeit with a bit more detail and useful insight into the driving force behind great stories.

From the Chapter:

• Introducing the story core at the beginning of a DST project helps students
  to focus at the outset on the power of their stories, and helps them see their
  own experiences as a great source of story material.
• Story planning and development steps:
  Get idea, Create story core, Create story map, Write the narrative, story, and/or script,
  Create storyboard if warranted
• Storyboards show the flow of story motion, while story maps show the flow of story
  emotion.
• Don’t have students use computers to create the VPS. They just get in the way at this point. Just have them use paper and pencil.
• The story map provides teachers a way to quickly ascertain the potential
  of a student’s story.
  

How are these ideas useful to me as a teacher?

I can't express the struggle I experience trying to convince my kids (and myself, in the face of so much opposition!) that my material is vital and powerful stuff. I believe that asking myself to produce a story core before each lesson (possibly in the form of a formal educational "objective," but certainly in parallel to whatever the objective is for the day) would help me find that sense of importance I always seek and do not always find in my material.

Goodness. How often did I sit and spend hours creating power points from scratch before I realized that sketching an outline on paper beforehand was a heck of a lot easier? A lot of time, I tell you. A lot. Even after I'd experimented with pre-digital coalescing of power points, I continued on creating them from scratch on occasion, running on the dogged assumption that I could get better at straight-to-power point work if I just practiced, darnit! I am a slow worker, so it always helps to hear and RE-HEAR methods of improving my creative efficiency, methods like, "Don't beat your head against the wall with technology until you've got your story effectively finished."

As a teacher, the last point in particular is a very important point for me to hear - if you're going to ask students to invest a lot of time and effort into Digital Story Telling of any type, or in any project for that matter, it's cool of you to have them sketch it out beforehand so they don't spend countless hours polishing a story/project that is, overall, mediocre even with an excellent shine job.

Philosophy of Education: The Movie!

"Hi! My name is Erin Gilland, and I strongly believe that. . . "

That's how my Educational Philosophy Introduction begins. Like most young teachers, I think, I have pretty loft ideals when it comes to talking about what I want for my students. I want them to come out all shiny and brilliant! I want to hone their questioning skills to a fine point! But mostly. . . I want them to grow as human beings. I hope my ideals will always be lofty, so that even when my students and I don't quiiiite reach them, we've still been striving for the right goals, and have probably learned a lot of really substantial skills and concepts along the way.

In the making of this video introduction, I did encounter a few hitches, but not nearly as many as I was expecting! I forgot my digital camera at home the first day I wanted to take pictures, but fortunately my mentor teacher had one I could use, and I remembered my own the next day. I had a scary moment when I thought I'd deleted all the pictures from the borrowed camera and couldn't find them in my e-mail - turns out, they were there, and they had somehow been deleted, but all it took was some careful searching of my trash bin to find and retrieve them. . .

A few weeks ago when I started thinking about this, I also expected to have problems finding a recording device. Not so, as I found out when installing Skype last Monday! Apparently, my beautiful new(ish) laptop has a built-in webcam AND voice recorder, which made my life quite a bit easier.

Read more. . .

To get my students going on a project like this, I would first try it as a multiple-dissection day tool. If I had one half the group dissect one organism, and the other half dissect a different organism on the same day, having them all take pictures of the different parts of the dissection, and knowing that they were going to have to lead someone else through it the next day, I think it could work out wonderfully! The class could do two dissections in one day, and spend the next day presenting their results to each other. This would probably work well for normal labs as well, where you could ask one or two groups to take pictures of everything they do so they can explain it to the absent people the next day. That's how I would begin using this type of project with students, eventually progressing to having them do individual projects for homework.