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There is one tool (well, more of a genre) that makes all others pale in comparison. Digital Storytelling. Reader beware, if you have not yet delved into this topic. You are about to go off and spend countless hours on the Internet wandering through joyful adventures.
Digital storytelling tells stories with multiple media, including still photos, graphics, text, animations, recorded audio, video, and music. Typically the story presents a theme or a point of view and is rather short compared to film. Many are just a few minutes long. There are countless educational uses for digital stories, such as the portrayal of an historical event, a rendition of a famous speech, science or math stories, and autobiographies.
Students in my classes particularly like “Head-Designed,” the story Giesbert Nijhuis, a graphic designer who, paralized from the neck down, shows with great dignity and humility how he uses technology to remain independent.
Another digital story: “Kindertransport: the Unknown Children of the Holocaust,” tells the story of Jewish children rescued from Hitler’s reign and sent by train to safety in Holland and Belguim. The narrator’s grandmother and great aunt were both rescued.
Finally, you might want to look at Aung San Suu Kyi and “Choice,” the story of her choice to stay under house arrest in Rangoong rather than permanently leave the country to live with her family in Oxford.
Digital storytelling can be effective as both an instructional tool for educators and as a learning tool for students. For teachers, it’s a great way to capture attention, break the ice on a difficult topic, or add excitement to tired lessons. For students, an assignment to create a digital story might have SLOs such as research, reflection, evaluation, analysis, synthesis … really, there seems no end to the possibilities.
Naturally there are challenges, both for teachers and students, in creating digital stories. Bad storytelling techniques are magnified in digital media. Both students and teachers need access to the technologies that can capture audio, video, images, etc. Learning to use the tools: cameras, scanners, microphones, authoring software can be overwhelming. And there’s the danger of getting seduced by what you can do without questioning why you would do it.
But before you get too discouraged, have a look at a few wonderful resources. If you’re willing to make the effort, you’ll find digital storytelling a both a lot of fun and a teaching tool.
Resources: