Story
Reflection – Digital Storytelling
Digital storytelling is a relatively “new practice” where people use digital tools to tell their story. Digital stories are short narrative stories that are interactive and presented in various formats, such as web-based stories, hypertexts, computer games and interactive stories. Popular software used is iMovie, Final Cut Express, YouTube, Vimeo, podcasts,prezi,pixton, one truemedia,slideshare and many more (Wikipedia).
Alan Davis defines a digital story as,
a form of short narrative, usually a personal narrative told in the first person, presented as a short movie for display on a television or computer monitor or projected onto a screen. (2004, p. 1)
I explored many of the digital storytelling tools and decided to use Pixton as it appeared to best represent a method that my students would be able to express client information or education related to oral health care. Other tools I explored that would also be effective tools would be prezi, slideshare, and YouTube. I liked the cartoon aspect of the Pixton software and it was fairly straightforward to use. I struggled with the concept of “storytelling” as a tool for educating an adult healthcare professional. It was challenging to tell a story about dental hygiene practice initially. My first intention was to introduce the new learner to the dental hygiene profession, sharing the introductory facts about a healthcare professional, their role and responsibilities; this seemed more like a presentation. My second attempt was to tell a story about a client case to build oral health awareness. Through some reflecting I decided that Pixton comic could be an effective learning activity for the students in my course, where they could create their own stories and then share with each other through the Learning Management System. Pedagogically this would allow them to construct their own knowledge and engage with a community of learners. The concept of a digital story creates an expressive medium for learning that will integrate subject matter, knowledge and skills. Through this learning experience I identified that it is very easy to become focused on the technology rather than producing the technical event of a narrative story, this would have to be emphasized when introducing this as a learning activity. I thoroughly enjoyed viewing my classmates digital stories, all very unique and expressive.
References
Davis, A. (2004). Co-authoring identity: Digital storytelling in an urban middle school. THEN: Technology, Humanities, Education, & Narrative, 1(1), 1. Available: http://thenjournal.org/feature/61
http://imoberg.com/files/World_of_Digital_Storytelling_The_Ohler_J._.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_storytelling