Digital Storytelling

I was actually going to write about digital storytelling in my last post and never got there- so I’ll do another on it here.

I recently attended a three day workshop in Victoria on my latest passion, digital storytelling. Digital storytelling combines digital images, music and voice overs to tell a story. The focus of this very exciting workshop in Victoria was on telling your own personal story. People have been using storytelling since the beginning of time to pass down values, beliefs and knowledge so why not use it to help students understand important math concepts? Egan (1989) contends that “information with high emotional colouring within a story is much more easily remembered by humans then a random list”.

If students were to produce their own digital stories would it help them to remember the important concepts? I have had students produce videos about people like Pythagoras and Decarte, which have been successful, but now I wonder how I can use this idea to help them understand concepts. I always read childrens’ storybooks such as Sir Circumference and the Dragons of Pi by Cindy Neuschwander. , even to my grade 11 students, who love the stories and seem to remember them for a long time. I think that having students explore important math concepts in a narrative style might help them understand and retain them better. Getting students to communicate mathematical understandings is often difficult and this would be a great way for assessing student understandings. Creating digital stories in groups could also provide great collaborative opportunities. I am excited to give it a try next year.

I found a how-to create a digital story on geometry called Geometry Digital Storytelling. I also found several examples of digital stories that focus on math concepts. The following one is on finding a slope-

Egan, K. (1989). Teaching as storytelling: An alternative approach to teaching and the curriculum. London: Routledge