Thing 4: Digital Storytelling

Digital Storytelling- It is not about the Tools…It’s about the Skills flickr photo by langwitches shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

For this activity I explored a few of the tools that were given (there were so many!).  I played around with PowToon, but I ran into some problems along the way.  I also played a bit with Moovly.

These were really cool, but they were much more time consuming than I thought. It really took quite a bit of pre-planning to determine what I wanted to make, and the have all the graphics and text ready. I wanted to add a graph but had trouble doing that.  I think it has a lot of potential as a tool to re-tell a story or to teach a concept.

My original idea to make a short video explaining a concept. I was going to make a video explaining petroleum formation, but had trouble finding all the graphics that I needed and didn’t have a clear view of what I was making.

I think this could be a tool for a teacher, such as myself, in an online class to make a quick video but I think these may be better tools for students to use to create summations of their knowledge or to tell a series of events.

My students and I were just recently talking about Love Canal, and they were not familiar with the events surrounding Love Canal, so I created a timeline of the events surrounding Love Canal.  I was not able to embed it, so it is linked here.

Timeline of events surrounding Love Canal

I could definitely see choosing one or two of these tools and teaching students to use it in order to summarize their learning on a topic, to do a research project and present their information or to make a timeline.

I think it would be important to limit the use of one tool at a time and to give students some structure to learn the tool. I would have to choose one and make an exemplar in order to learn it better myself. It is a way to allow students to practice parts of the writing process (ideas and details, organizing information and telling a coherent story) in a more interactive format, or a way that may appear more ‘fun’ or to have less pressure. At the same time, it helps them build technology skills.

I think the storyboard idea, or the timeline idea really helps to organize information to to break it down into sequence and main ideas, which are important skills for a student processing information.

I would like to have students create a timeline or a storyboard/infographic for some type of topic at the end of the unit, or in place of a research project. These tools could be used for almost any topic. They are so broad!