I am creating a course site on Digital Storytelling ( DST) for my ETEC 565 project. This digital storytelling module will provide an opportunity for students and teachers to learn about digital storytelling, create a class project, and finally have the opportunity to develop their own digital story. This module will be used by several classes and is being developed to support the students as well as teachers who have never used DST before.
Anderson ( 2008) holds that if we are going to provide effective on-line learning spaces we need to include community centered activities that allow learners to collaboratively create new knowledge. This project requires a collaborative space that will allow students to brain-storm, contribute and edit a shared documents, upload samples of various multi-media including still images, videos, and music , provide feedback to peers and pose questions to peers and the teacher.
Although there will be several community centered activities through-out this project, one of the spaces I have created is a wiki for my digital storytelling module. The class will use this wiki to work through the process of creating a group digital story. The wiki will provide a space for students to learn about DST and practice the steps in a safe collaborative place before they start on their own projects. The teachers will have the opportunity to assess student understandings before they begin to work on their personal stories. A wiki provides the ideal space for group work and brainstorming, both needed to complete the class project. The binary function will allow the student to add sample images and music. Using a wiki also allows students to explore in a digital space, the same space that they will be creating their own stories. The asynchronous nature of the wiki will allow the students time to think about their answers, and will also provide a permanent record of ideas that they can return to later.
I will be able to track student contributions by clicking the history tab. At the same time students contributions can be made anonymously if we choose to do it that way.
The only concern I have about this wiki space is that it does not allow for simultaneous editing. If this becomes a problem I will create an external wiki that does allow for this and create a link to the Moodle project.
Anderson, T. (2008). Teaching in an Online Learning Context. In: Anderson, T. & Elloumi, F. Theory and Practice of Online Learning. Athabasca University.