Week 3 - Digital Storytelling

Assignment Title: Digital Storytelling

Uses in the Classroom
Movie trailers are an instructional technique that has been taught to graphic design students for years. It’s a great way to get students familiar with the combinations of audio and video and have them create a polished piece of work that they can be proud of. However, Digital Storytelling allows teachers to use the same techniques that film companies have been doing for years to grab the audience and apply that to a lesson plan.

While there’s a big difference between a movie trailer and a digital story, I envision this tool as used to illustrate something very simple or to introduce a larger lesson or unit. I think this tool has real potential as a grabber for students and would get them excited about learning a new concept. I also believe this tool aligns well with the idea of learning goals, an assessment technique that gives students real life friendly expectations for a specific lesson and lets them keep an “eye on the prize” throughout the lesson. Digital storytelling could potentially function as a form of learning goal, showing the students the concept of a topic or topics before the lesson even begins.

Finally, there’s a possibility to return to the tried and true method of using small videos in the classroom by having the students create their own stories using digital storytelling. This would add a human element to something mundane like writing an autobiography or a family history and allows us to bring visual elements to the classroom. We could also use this concept to illustrate difficult scenes from literature; imagine having students act out Romeo and Juliet in their own language rather than ye ol’ Shakespearian language.
Issues to Consider
Videos are a great tool, but like most multimedia projects we always have copyright to consider when making any type of shared video. Although the creative commons has done a good job of trying to make royalty free content available online for free, particularly with education, the temptation is to use the much better content that’s easy to find in a google image search. For instance, when looking up images for this project in particular, I had significant difficulty finding good images to support my theme as most technology images are protected under copyright. To overcome this, I found the google image search feature that allows you to search for creative commons images helpful, but with younger students I doubt they would bother.

Like most computer multimedia projects, this type of a venture is somewhat vulnerable to technology requirements. For instance, I worked in a school that had Pentium 4 computers up until last year. In the eyes of the Administration this wasn’t an issue as the students mostly did “word and excel” and the antiquated technology was more than sufficient to run Office 2003…*facepalm*. However, when working with digital media the instructor must be sure the technology is present and available.

Copyright
All images were located using copyright free websites crawled using the Google image search “distribution and manipulation” setting which returns only properly licensed images. Music related to this video rendering is used with permission and downloaded from freestockmusic.com which is linked from the Creative Commons music distribution page, a second musical recording is a stock recording shipped with Apple iMovie.