Special Treasures
Storytelling is one of the most natural and powerful ways of sharing our past experience and lessons learned. Cultures have used storytelling to explain the world, and pass on values, beliefs and knowledge. Bruner (1990) describes the following pedagogical affordances of using storytelling in classrooms:
- Assists us in the sharing of our human diversity
- Assists us in understanding human action, intentionality and temporality by facilitating the understanding of the past events of one’s life and the
planning of future actions - Aids us in the building of persuasive arguments
- Facilitates the attainment of vicarious experience by helping us to distinguish the positive models to emulate from the negative models to avoid
- Mediates in the process of articulating our identity so that we can explain to others who we are with a series of interconnected stories.
By having students tell their own personal stories and then write them down, they gain valuable experiences with writing and verbal communication
skills in a emotionally engaging way.
Digital storytelling simply takes storytelling one step further allowing students to develop digital literacy skills. Digital storytelling will provide opportunities for students to meet the following six educational standards that ISTE recommends all 21st century learners.
1. Creativity and Innovation
2.
Communication and Collaboration
3. Research and Information Fluency
4.
Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making
5. Digital Citizenship
6. Technology Operations and Concepts.
My intent was to create a digital story that students could use as a model to follow while creating their own story. Every year I do a unit called “Family Treasures” where I have the students research an item treasured by someone in their family. The main criteria for the item is that it must have a good story attached to it.
We start this unit by participating in a video conference with a museum curator in a nearby city. The curator presents a variety of strange and not so strange “treasures” that have really interesting stories. Students also have the opportunity to learn about interviewing techniques, providence gathering, and how to care for treasured objects.
Students then set to work locating and telling about their own family treasures. In the past students have presented their treasures to the class and via video conference, to the museum curator.
Having students tell their stories in a digital format seems to be an excellent improvement in this process for many reasons. It will allow students who cannot bring the item to class, a better forum to showcase the object. Students can now include images, videos, and recordings of other people who are linked to the object. As well, it will provide a permanent record of the treasured object.
I had a great time exploring 50 ways to tell a story. I found many of these tool interesting but none really fit the bill for my project. Animoto probably came the closest, but because of the short length of the free version, I wouldn’t use it for this particular assignment. I chose to use Voice Thread because I could record my voice and could make it as long as needed.
The following digital story was created in Voice Thread.
I am not very happy with the final result. The story is choppy due to the slide nature of this program. In order to make a smooth movie like presentation with transitions, I would have to create my project outside of voice thread and import it. Adding music or sound effects would also be rather complicated. I have created the same story using the video editing software Sony Vegas ( see below) which is really the effect I was looking for.
I think that I could use Voice Thread for many things. It would be easy to post daily math lesson in Voice Thread. Students could access the thread, view it, leave comments or ask questions. The questions could be answered by anyone in the class- Voice Thread even allows one to phone in a comment, so it would allow for anywhere anytime interactivity.
Voice Thread is a great collaborative tool, allowing students to contribute and make comments about other’s contributions. Students can create videos in video editing software and share them on voice thread. YouTube is blocked in my school division so this would provide one way to showcase their work. Voice thread has a variety of privacy settings, so it would allow students to share their projects with a selected few. Voice Thread provides three options for sharing comments- written, recorded, or phoned in. I think students would really enjoy having these options and would be far more likely to leave comments. Voice Thread also allows for comments to be moderated before they are posted.
I think Voice Thread is a great tool, unfortunately it was not the tool I needed for my project.
The following is another version of this digital story created in Sony Vegas, a proprietary video editing software on a free 30 day trial.
References:
Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press
International Society for Technology in Education. (2008). National educational technology standards for teachers. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/NETS/ForTeachers/2008Standards/NETS_T_Standards_Final.pdf
What a great little story! Your use of pictures, voice and timing kept the suspense high! What a wonderful thing to do to make up for a lost painting!
Hi Bev,
I enjoyed your story and have been in Ray’s position a couple time during my travels! Your pacing, voice and choice of pictures created a beautiful digital story!
Sandy
You said:
“Having students tell their stories in a digital format seems to be an excellent improvement in this process for many reasons. It will allow students who cannot bring the item to class, a better forum to showcase the object. Students can now include images, videos, and recordings of other people who are linked to the object. As well, it will provide a permanent record of the treasured object.”
I like this rationale for using this technology to support student learning. Very thoughtful Bev and I did like the story you created. You also spoke to engagement in your rationale. This is something we are focussed on in our AISI work in Foothills and I too spoke to ‘engagement’ as a reason for exploring these varied storytelling technologies.
Hi Bev,
I really enjoyed your story. It is well paced and had all the elements of a really short story. I liked the second version better. As a someone who teaches Literature I can see how I could have groups of students present their short stories using these tools. Nice work!
Delphine