Digital Story and Reflection

I played around with PhotoStory 3.




I also uploaded some Korat videos made by students. Much better than mine.



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And......




I've been looking at this blog post for a week or so now thinking about what it means to tell a story digitally. I've been trying to think even what digital story telling means. Is a PowerPoint a digital story...I guess it COULD be. Is a picture book a digital story? How else are the pictures in the book produced if not digitally? The whole book itself...Kindle??? Are books on Kindle digital stories? Or maybe to qualify as a digital story all the "reader" has to do is push play? And the primary elements of the story are expressed in pictures?

In 7th grade humanities, we've just finished our first major novel study of the year. Half the classes read Mzungu Boy, and the other half read Before We were Free. One of the culminating assessment tasks included discussing how the author reveals character in the novel. We had the students write about the topic in a traditional way (traditional these days meaning typed on the computer and printed out.) I wonder how much more powerfully, if at all the students could have told their "story" of character development through a digital story--or maybe digital essay would be better. Not a photo essay, but a visual essay that might include images they find to represent what the author is revealing and how it related overall to a picture (ha!) of the character developed in the readers' minds.

Digital story telling certainly might get the students excited about creating a final product that is different then the norm, and maybe the "tech" hook would be enough to motivate many of them to strive to include the necessary elements, though maybe just as many would be put-off by the amount of "extra" work involved in putting together a digital story. And finally, humanities is in part language arts, as in writing, so we can't simply replace the traditional essay or short story with something "digital".