Digital Storytelling is absolutely awesome. I wish I had been told about this as a strategy a long, long time ago. It is so very simplistic in nature but an incredibly awesome tool to convey learning. Peuntedura would be proud of this (Bloom as well) I think to see students and teachers using this to display higher order thinking skills.
It actually reminds me of a high school project that my friends and I did for our Grade 10 English class (way back in 1986). We were studying the Merchant of Venice and the project was to take a scene from the play and rewrite it in a modern setting or any setting of our choice. My friends and I chose to use the scene where Shylock's daughter speaks to him of her love interest with a Venetian man, a non-jew. We changed the setting from Venice to Mexico and instead of Jews we used Buddhists. We got a friend's parent to help us film it. We wrote the script. We planned all the details. We even added a levitating Buddhist monk. If ever there was a project that I was proud of, it was that one. As I think about it now, I really don't remember anything else I did academically in high school. I remember this one because I was engaged in it. I learned something from it. I learned more than the point, theme, and iambic pentameters of the play. I learned how to do something. I learned how to tell a story because I became a part of the story.
I wish that my other classes/teachers could have offered me something like this because it would have made my high school years that much easier for me. It would have motivated me and I could have had greater success. Perhaps I wouldn't have had to re-do a lot of my high school over again in order to get into university.
That high school project got me to collaborate with my partners and we were equally motivated to do well...not because this was another school project but because this had become something meaningful to us. We had to think critically and solve problems. We didn't have the technology we have now. We had one camera, one video tape, one VCR. That's it. Adding the levitating monk wasn't part of the project but we wanted to do it because we thought it would really capture the idea of how different Buddhists were from Catholic Mexicans just like how different Jews were from Venetians. But how were we going to show levitation happen on screen. Critical thinking and problem solving was really used by us for that. We did. Let's just say we used a long strong beam, a couch, drapes, and teeter-totter action to get it done. And it was well done.
Fast forward. If that was the experience I had, then I'm certain that with the technology we have now our students could do the same things or go further than we could imagine. It kind of reminds me of a TV show, the Six Million Dollar Man. In the opening sequence, the narrator says, "we can rebuild him, we have the technology, stronger faster, better!" That's how I see it with the technology we have to teach our students. In fact it's not us teaching them but them teaching themselves.
Digital storytelling is just an avenue to help our students get engaged and involved in their learning. The role of the teacher is to guide and help the student however he/she may need it. The teacher isn't formally teaching but helping the students to learn for themselves. As it pertains to digital storytelling, Edutopia says the teacher acts as the executive producer. The teacher provides the leadership that the students need.
Would I use this in the classroom? Most definitely yes! The possibilities are endless. I could have students re-enact a historical situation in Social Studies and tell the story from varied perspectives. Later as a class we could then compare the different perspectives. In science, students could collect and combine pictures pertaining to photosynthesis and tell how it happens. In math, perhaps students could write a song/rap/story about how to multiply fractions. In health/PE class student could write a digital story about body image and self esteem. Like I said, the possibilities are endless.
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