Responses to Digital Storytelling

3rd April 2006

posted in digitalstorytelling |

I shared two workshops this afternoon in Fort Worth at ESC11, one on digital storytelling and the other on podcasting in the classroom. After viewing several digital stories (”Grass Born to be Stepped On” and both “Sacrificios” and “We Learned to Sing” from the Center for Digital Storytelling) the participants shared the following responses about digital storytelling:

Responses:
- Cross-curricular applications
- Inspires conversation
- Kids are moviated to do it / engaged
- Great learning tool
- Lots of research
- Can connect with schema or help develop new schema
- Depth of emotion
- Personalized stories can be the most powerful
- Preservation of history
- Can allow students to take a stand
- Family connections: archiving tools
- Stories become internalized
- Hearing the stories could change kids
- Great library of stories
- Great resources
- Kids like to hear stories of other kids
- Where have we been? Why are we not doing this?
- Kids could identify with this
- Honesty in the voices
- Music plays a pro or con for success of story
- Teachers don’t want to look stupid [so this could be challenging to do with students in the classroom]

Overall the workshop was a lot of fun, and I hope participants walked away both inspired and empowered to try digital storytelling with their students in the remaining weeks of the school year.

The workshop curriculum is available online, feel free to use this with teachers at your school!

On this day..

College students: Win $$$ for developing social networking apps - 2008
links for 2008-04-03 - 2008
Head faking kids to love programming and change the world - 2008
KidCast Podcasting Awards - 2007
Podcast49: Open the Door - Conversation, Complexity, and Messy Assessment - 2006
The 2nd US Civil War - 2006
Skull Island Game - 2006
Embracing Technology for Positive Change - 2006
EdTech: Tool for Empowerment, Vocational Opportunities, Social Change - 2005

This entry was posted on Monday, April 3rd, 2006 at 6:10 pm and is filed under digitalstorytelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

1 On April 3rd, 2006, Brian Crosby said:

Hi Wesley - As someone that utilizes digital video with students I would highly advocate for its use in the classroom. I can’t think of anything I do with students that is more powerful than doing a video project. I have used “Grass Born To Be Stepped On” in several classes I’ve done with teachers - very good at making the point about the research and writing and problem solving and discussion and design and production and trial and error and much, much more that goes into this kind of work. The end result is incredible, but the journey to get to the final product is usually even more incredible. I am in the early stages of building my learningismessy.com web site with among other things the videos my students have made over the years. I only have one posted as of last night (Don’t Laugh At Me), but it won an honorable mention from Apple the year that “Grass” won the top award. The students not only designed the whole thing, they got incredible feedback from Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul and Mary) who sang the song and Steve Seskin who co-wrote the song visited my classroom and did an hour long concert for the whole school. So students designed, wrote and produced a video and got incredible feedback from the community - what could be better?
Brian

2 On April 4th, 2006, Libby Hamilton said:

Wes - I can’t say how inspiring these two workshops were to me! I am so fired up and excited about digital storytelling as well as podcasting! I look forward to incorporating both next year. I’m also on the road to present to the school board why we should be blogging as well.

Libby

3 On April 5th, 2006, Wesley Fryer said:

That is great Libby, please keep in touch and let me know when you and your students have some digital stories online! These really are compelling subjects and ways of communicating that we need to be doing with more kids. I am glad you found the workshops helpful and motivating!