The Story of Scratch

My Story

For my story I decided to tell the story of Scratch, the educational programming language developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT. I wanted my story to detail where it came from, why it was developed, how it has evolved into the educational tool it is today and what its future might look like.

I created my digital story with two different audience groups in mind. The first group being a management team in charge of making the decision on whether or not to include a module on Scratch in the school curriculum next year. The second group is the potential teachers who would be teaching the new module if the decision was made to go ahead and include it in the curriculum.

I think this story is worth telling as Scratch is an excellent educational resource to include in many types of educational environments from beginner programming to arts based classrooms. I think teachers and school curriculum decision makers need to be aware of Scratch and its story so it can be a potential tool in their toolkits. Scratch is an easy-to-use and intuitive tool that can help students to amongst other things: think creatively, communicate clearly and analyze systematically. Furthermore, it also helps students develop a deeper level of fluency with digital technology.

My Tool of Choice – Prezi

I choose Prezi from Levine’s (2007) “50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story” for a number of reasons. Firstly, I wanted a tool that I could use to easily remix/mash-up existing resources (text, images, video, audio etc) in keeping with the philosophy of Scratch and the current 565 unit, “Unit 11. Rip Remix Feed: Creative Mashups”. I wanted to try and broadly bring these concepts into my digital story if possible. Secondly, I also wanted to create a story where people could go and dig deeper after the story was told. Specifically I wanted to give a quick overview of some sections and allow viewers to go back and look deeper into areas that are of interest to them after the presentation was finished.  Ideally providing different levels of information for different audience members. Prezi while not perfect seemed to be the best tool from the list of 50 to fit these needs.

NB. If I had had more time to create this story I would like tried to give it a go in Scratch itself. This is due to the fact I think potentially Scratch could be added to the technologies listed in “50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story”

Strengths and Limitations of the Storytelling Approach

Strengths

I think the digital storytelling approach is excellent. It promotes imagination and creativity.  It gives users a way to express themselves in many different ways. Potentially the approach can allow users to present their knowledge more proficiently in a fashion they feel more comfortable or adept in.  Furthermore, digital storytelling tools can allow users to display links and relationships between ideas and information in ways not previously possible with an essay or a presentation.  The approach forces user to think outside of the square a bit more, to develop more reflectively their ideas on a given issue/story.  To look at it from more than just one angle.

Limitations

The main limitations to the digital story telling approach I see are related to time, technology and cost. There are so many tools out there to choose from it seems a bit haphazard that teachers/students will select the best tool for each digital story they create. I do not see teachers/students having the technical knowledge or time to evaluate all the possible options out there. Other limitations are technical difficulties with the tools or steep learning curves before being able to use them proficiently. Both of these factors can lead to a lot of wasted time when creating digital resources. Additionally, often the best tools are likely to be too expensive for most students and teachers to use in an educational/classroom environment. Plus the cost of the related hardware and internet connections needed to support some of these applications can also be excessive.

References

Levine, A. (2007). 50 Web 2.0 ways to tell a story. Retrieved July 15th, 2011 from http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryTools

Sources

All the digital resource materials and Scratch projects used in this digital story were sourced from the official Scratch or ScratchEd websites and are shared under the Creative Commons license.