Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

OKC Bombing, Underground Chinatown in Oklahoma, Veteran Stories, and an Amazing Adoption from Russia

We wrapped up another Celebrate Oklahoma Voices digital storytelling workshop for twenty more educators today, and again I was blown away by the quality and themes of the 3-5 minute stories they chose to tell with still images and audio narration in the space of just 2 and a half days.

“Innocence Lost” by Andrea is the story of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, with a superb introduction which really helps establish a good frame of reference for the context of this tragedy.


Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

“Oklahoma City’s Underground Chinatown” by Regina Hartley (RSHartley on Twitter) tells an amazing story about an underground world where Chinese Oklahomans lived during the early years of our state. I was amazed to learn that the Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States was in effect from 1882 to 1943. Good grief. Racism is not new to us, is it?


Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Regina noted that her video is an incomplete draft, but I think even this initial version is REMARKABLE. Add this video to the digital witness scorecard for Storychasers and Celebrate Oklahoma Voices, along with Kenneth Osborn’s video “Indian Jack Jacobs” from this week. 🙂 (By the way, Regina is an elementary librarian. Woo hoo, let’s hear it for library media specialists modeling the way forward with digital literacy and 21st century skills!)

“Jack Applegate” is a video by another librarian leader (Perri) about the amazing experiences of her father-in-law as a member of the 101st Airborne Division in the Second World War. Can you imagine going AWOL with a broken knee cap so you could parachute into enemy-occupied France with your brothers-in-arms? This is a remarkable and inspiring story. Perri said it took 5-6 hours for her to write this script, and about 8 hours total to record and edit just the audio track for this video. What an effort! Those hours of work certainly paid off.


Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

“The Long Road to healing” by Lori Nelson is another veteran story, but this one discusses a return after 42 years to Vietnam.


Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

“…And Then There Were Nine” by Meisha Prince is an amazing story of how her in-laws ended up adopting four orphans from Russia. This video is certainly a “story of faith,” which is a separate digital storytelling project I’ve been working to start in the past year. This is really a touching tale.


Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Great job Oklahoma educators! Our digital storytelling efforts continue and are really just getting started! 🙂

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