Digital Storytelling
The art of storytelling creates a profound shift from being externally directed by the world media to an experience of empowerment that involves the sharing of stories using state-of-the-art technology. This process honors individuals, families, and cultures by giving value to personal experience and is therefore a trustworthy tool for cultural preservation and global understanding. As a classroom project, digital storytelling can help educators meet established learning objectives while providing a robust, hands-on technology experience for their students. For students, the project-based focus of digital storytelling affords an opportunity to explore new modes of expression, new ways of working independentely and with peers.
In addition to mastering the 21st Century skills required to complete a finished project, this hands-on work helps students consider the importance of audience and to develop a strong authorial voice. Students explore the connections between listener and viewer, and text, sound, and image. Through this process, they begin to engage with a range of both ethical and aesthetic decisions central to the telling and re-telling of stories. Digital storytelling helps students see themselves as not only media consumers, but as media producers.
Using scraps of multimedia materials such as snapshots, music clips, video, and other memorabilia from our lives, and combining them with our own words on a computer creates a unique story. Digital Storytelling can focus on a wide range of topics and contains a particular point of view. In this workshop, the topic of the videos will be unique to the individuals themselves. They will choose the type of digital story they would like to create and using a Flip Video Camera and MovieMaker will shoot footage and create a 60 to 90 second digital story on the first day and on the second day the topic of the video will be the participant themselves. Using photos, they will create an "All About Me" 30 second video using Audacity and Animoto.
Objectives
Learning Objectives:
- Describe and understand storytelling as a teaching and learning tool.
- Identify the elements of storytelling.
- Identify the elements of shooting good video footage
- Exploration of the power of storytelling for the teacher, students, and their connection to subject matter.
- Create a storyboard for production.
- Produce an individual, unique digital story using Flip Cameras
- Use desktop production tools, Movie Maker, in the creation of a 60-90 second digital story
- Use a web-based application, Animoto, in the creation of a 30 second digital story
- Introduce Animations as a form of digital storytelling
- Saving/uploading/publishing/ embedding completed digital stories
Discipline Applications:
- Utilizing Instructors Digital story as an introduction to your students.
- Incorporating elements of storytelling or technology to improve classroom participation, interaction, and retention. .
- Utilizing a digital story as an activity to "get to know" your students at the beginning of the school year.
NETS for Teachers - NETS*S 1. Creativity and Innovation
Students demonstrate creative thinking, construct knowledge, and develop innovative products and processes using technology.
Students:
- apply existing knowledge to generate new ideas, products, or processes.
- create original works as a means of personal or group expression.
- use models and simulations to explore complex systems and issues.
- identify trends and forecast possibilities
Creating lessons where students "apply existing knowledge to generate new products o processes" and "create original works" can be an exciting, yet tasking process. However, there are so many tools and resources that are readily available through the WWW. In order to introduce these applications to students and implement them into the classroom, teachers must know where to find them and how to use them. Educators already know that every student learns differently, so providing various modes to express what they know and be given the option to use their imagination through innovation is a really terrific thing!
Some examples of how to meet this NETs Standard can be using Book Cover Creator to identify and explain the events of the plot of a book, creating Character Trading Cards, creating Poetry using digital photos and PowerPoint, Designing, Building, and Programing Robots in a Robotics Lap, using Video programs to create Digital Story or to create a claymation project, creating Podcasts to critique art, or using Google Earth in a World History and Geography class.
Tech Requirements
- Computers with Internet Access
- Flip Cameras
- Windows MovieMaker
- Animoto
- Audacity
- Headset with Microphone
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Digital Storytelling in Plain English
The Seven Elements of Digital Storytelling set to music, words, and images.
Making a Good Movie
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Activities and Resources
Activity 1 - Introduction to Storytelling
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Participants will be introduced to the Art of Digital Storytelling. They will view a short video "Digital Storytelling in Plain English" which is located above.
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There are several different types of digital stories; participants will learn and discuss the different types of Digital Stories to begin thinking about the type of digital story they would like to produce.
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Activity 2 - Choosing Topics
- At this point, participants will be grouped in 3 or 4 depending on the number of Flip Video Cameras and number of participants.
- Brainstorming will begin by viewing and discussing possible scenarios
- Participants can choose from one of the scenarios from the list or they will choose their own scenario/topic for their digital story. Choosing a topic
Activity 3 - Storyboarding and Script Writing
What is a storyboard? It's a place to plan out your digital story in two dimensions. The first dimension is time: what happens first, next, and last. The second is of interaction:
- how does the voiceover (your story) interact with the images,
- how do visual transitions and effects help tie together the images, and
- how does the voiceover interact with the musical soundtrack
Any element can interact with any other one, and the storyboard is the place to plan out the impact you intend to make on the audience. Since this is a tutorial, we'll sketch out a storyboard using only the images, voiceover, and soundtrack. An experienced digital storyteller would have some idea of what transitions and effects might be appropriate at the early storyboarding stage, but we'll leave that step for later. More resources for teaching storyboarding and script writing.
Activity 4 - Shooting Video Footage
- Introduction to using Flip Cameras
- With the script written and the digital storyboard finalized, participants will proceed outdoors or into another room and begin shooting footage for their digital story using Flip Cameras.
- Ten tips for Shooting Great Video
Recording Digital Video
Activity 4 - Creating a Digital Story
- Once participants have shot footage, they will be back in the computer lab to begin creating their digital story
- Participants will be introduced to MovieMaker as the software they will use to create their digital stories.
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Movie Maker Tips and Tricks
Activity 5 - Introduction to Animoto
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On the second day, students will learn to use a web application to produce a different kind of digital story. At this point of the workshop, students have completed their digital stories using Movie Maker and now will use digital photographs to create a digital story using Animoto and will use Audacity to capture their audio tracts.
What is Animoto?
Animoto is an easy to use web application that produces videos from your photos, video clips, and music. This is an engaging, simple video creation application that can be used in all subject areas.
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Activity 6 - Storyboarding and Script Writing
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Participants will be introduced to the topic for this digital story - "All About Me". Participants have been asked to bring digital photographs for this project. Using these images, participants will storyboard and write a script that will be recorded using Audacity.
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The idea for this type of digital story is based on:
The first days of school can be difficult. Patience is the name of the game as students learn classroom rules and daily routines. It might be weeks before they are up to speed. The first days of school have their upside too. It's time to make a fresh start. Most fun of all, the opening days of school are an opportunity to get to know a whole new group of kids! What will you do during those first few days of school? What activities might you do to help you get to know your new students? What activities will help students get to know you and one another? One activity you can do is having your students introduce themselves using photographs they bring from home and having them create a digital story.This lesson provides opportunities for students to identify various aspects which contribute to their uniqueness. Students will create their individual digital quilt through a 30-60 second video. This piece will include self portrait, one item that represents their family, one item that represents where they come from and one item that represents something they value the most. Further, students gain an understanding of their place in the classroom community by creating a classroom quilt video; "Our Classroom Quilt".
Activity 6 - Introduction to Audacity
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About Audacity
Audacity is a free, easy-to-use and miltilingual audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to:
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Record live audio
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Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs
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Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files
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Cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together
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Change the speed or pitch of a recording
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And much, much more!
Go to http://audacity.sorceforge.net for more information or to download lastest version
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Activity 8 - Now that I have my videos - What do I do with them?
- This serves as the wrap-up of the workshop. Participants will learn how to:
- Burn the videos created onto a USB drive
- Upload into iTunes (participants will create an account if they do not already have one)
- Upload into YouTube and/or TeacherTube (participants will create an account if they do not already have one)
- Learn how to embed into websites, wikis, blogs, etc.
Assessment
Remember - the most important aspect of a rubric is your ability to explain it to others, especially to yours students. Feel free to use any of the rubrics below. We recommend that you personalize it so it makes complete sense to you and to your students.
Before developing your rubric, first consider:
- Set clear goals. While I appreciate that this sounds like something Capt. Obvious would say, this is particulalry important when it comes to student new media projects for the following simple reason. When students prepare written work you can always judge the quality of their writing, whether you know much about the subject or not. But when students prepare new media like digital stories, this fallback position vanishes because most teachers don't feel comfortable assessing new media narrative. This is understandable, given that many teachers have created little new media themselves, and certainly weren't taught how to assess it in their teacher education programs. So, the only fallback position available to them becomes: did students meet the goals of the project?
- Assess everything. The final story is the tip of the iceberg. Preparing a digital story involves writing, creating artwork, preparing planning documents, and a number of other activities that produce tangible, assessable artifacts that address a number of intelligences, literacies and skill areas. A digital story is literally a portfolio unto itself. Try to assess as much of the formative work as you can.
- Assess the process. Did students plan well? Work in groups well? Much of what is transferrable from digital storytelling to other activities, media and non-media based, centers on planning skills.
- Include self-assessment and peer review. Include these whenever possible and appropriate. Media development relies on risk taking and honest self-assessment of the outcome. It also relies on a community of learners sharing their skills and insights.
Additional Activities
If time permits, participants will be introduced to two alternative software programs which they can use to create digital stories.
Workshop Resources
Downloadable Documents:
Storyboards
Post-Workshop Activities
Bridge to Practice
Digital stories are short, personal multimedia tales that can be created by people everywhere, on any subject, and shared electronically all over the world. There are many kinds of stories and ways to classify stories. The Identity Quilt addresses the personal story. The Identity Quilt is an excellent way to introduce digital storytelling in the classroom. To extend digital storytelling in your classroom you may want to have students produce personal or academic stories. A personal story is one that involves a personal change or realization. This could be a family story about the value of a childhood experience, a reunion in which you reconnect with a long lost friend, a hero in your family, a story about your life told from the point of view of an object or a pet,...you name it. It can be anything. Digital storytelling can also be used in the content areas as an academic story or "unit of instruction" story. This can be a story about any concept, unit or idea from any area of the curriculum, from math to social studies.
Some content extensions could be:
- Heroes vs. Villains,
- Presidential Candidates,
- Tributes to people such as Walt Disney or Martin Luther King
- Historical events such as the Boston Tea Party or the Underground Railroad
- Inventions and their Inventors
- How have animals adapted or what happened to the dinosaurs?
- Fairy tales from a different perspective
- Math is all around town-videotape your town and look for geometry
- Tell stories about famous scientists/mathematicians and illustrate their theories through video.
- Meet the Master Artists
Downloadable & Printable Documents Sharing More Ideas about Digital Storytelling
More Resources
Talent Releases
Talent Release Information
Sample Talent Release Form
Copyright Free Images
- Creative commons: http://creativecommons.org/
- Flickr- http://flickr.com
- Wikipedia Public Domain Image Resources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain_image_resources
- Pics for Learning: http://pics.tech4learning.com/
- Davis Audio & Video Clips http://www.djusd.k12.ca.us/technology/images.htm
Royalty Free Sound Sources
- http://www.pacdv.com/sounds/
- http://www.partnersinrhyme.com/pir/PIRsfx.shtml
- http://www.a1freesoundeffects.com/
- http://www.archive.org/details/audio
- http://www.stonewashed.net/free-music.html
- http://www.freesound.org/
- http://www.macloops.com/
- http://www.nmc.org/jampack
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