Digital Story
Seth’s Grandpa – a digital adaptation of May The Wind Always Be At Your Back by Karrie Emms
After spending quite a while browsing Allan Levine’s collection of Domino stories, I finally settled on using Scrapblog to retell May The Wind… I briefly considered using Glogster, but nixed the idea after seeing my age posted publicly, without any way to control what gets displayed. For this reason alone, I would not ask my students to use Glogster in any educational setting. To be honest, choosing the storytelling tool took longer than actually using it.
How did the tool impact the manner in which you told your story (perhaps in a way that is different had you just used text or related the story using your voice)?
By using a scrapbook presentation, I gave up some control over the timeline of the story as it was originally written. While the pages of the scrapbook can be sequenced, each page is more of an overall expression of a theme or event. Even so, I tried to take advantage of our western tendency to read left-to-right/top-to-bottom. Scrapbooks also depend more on images than text to convey a story. Even abridged, the text that I had was longer than would be appropriate for this medium. Instead, I used snippets from the text interspersed with the images from the book and a few additional images found on flickr (Creative Commons licenced). In order to tell the story, though, I needed to add an audio stream for each page. This was probably the most challenging aspect of creating the Scrapblog, as the only audio that can be added directly is a small selection of canned music. Scrapblog does have the option of embedding YouTube videos. My solution, then, was to use Audacity to record myself reading the abridged text, export as mp3 files, and add the audio to a movie created in Picasa 3 using images from the text and flickr, uploading the videos to YouTube, and embedding them into the Scrapblog pages.
How might you use such tools in your own teaching to produce materials for students?
In the context of my moodle course for Anglican Lay Readers, this story in particular can be a focal point for a discussion of how children process grief over the loss of a family member. Storytelling is deeply rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition through the retelling of Bible stories and telling new stories in the context of biblical stories. The digital format enables us to add further dimensions to these stories through images, video and audio. While this format is dynamic and attractive, I’m not certain I would want to use it frequently in this context: it is fairly labour intensive to produce and any student will tire of the same presentation format after several iterations. I might recommend this or similar tools to students to create a component of a summative assignment.
How might students be given access to the same authoring tools?
Since I’m dealing with adult students, I would simply ask them to create their own accounts.
What kind of impact would you expect to see in your students in terms of motivation, creativity, or any other characteristics?
I don’t think that using these tools would make my students any more or less motivated or creative than they already are. What I would expect is that those students who are creative may see the use of such tools as license to let their creativity out of the box. Other adult learners may just find this an overwhelming task and either pass on it, or give up unless it’s a required activity.
