Digital Storytelling and Literacy Autobiography
Hello! I very much appreciate the invitation to join this blog. Thank you.
At the SITE conference, I and my colleague, Jing Qi, will hold a roundtable discussion on a project in digital storytelling we undertook last Fall. In this project, we collaborated with a middle level pre-service instructor who teaches a course called Teaching Young Adolescents. The course calls upon students to reflect upon their personal journeys in literacy and asks them to write an autobiography about themselves in these terms. We decided that digital storytelling would be a wonderful way to take one of the small moments in this journey and expand it.
At the conference we'll share some of the end products of this assignment. We were very pleased with the results but had moments of doubt when the logistics of handling these projects caused students a fair amount of stress. Nonetheless, when finished, students were very pleased with their efforts.
We all agree that adding the elements of images and music to the student narratives took their stories to another dimension that would not have been visible by simply reading the narrative. We want to explore this more fully in a future project next Fall.
This roundtable discussion is scheduled for Wednesday, from 4-5:00 p.m. in Lake. I look forward to meeting many of you at the conference and am interested in learning additional ways in which pre-service teachers are using digital storytelling for reflection.
-- Sandy Lathem
The University of Vermont
Portfolio Connection Grant - PT3
posted by Sandra A. Lathem (aka Sandy) @ 7:07 AM
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4 Comments:
Sandy: I'll look forward to hearing about your experiences using digital storytelling with pre-service teachers. This is a strong interest of mine, and I'll be interested not only in seeing the results of the final projects but also getting details on your lessons learned. I have been using PhotoStory3 with teachers in inservice workshops and had pretty good luck, but one of the most important parts of creating a digital story is sharing it online with others. I have just started experimenting with Bubbleshare as a way to create narrated digital stories, and although they are not as fancy as those created with iMovie or PhotoStory, they ARE immediately web-sharable.
How much did copyright and intellectual property issues come up with your students as they created digital stories? If the students knew they were going to share their final products online, do you think that would have been (or would be) a major creativity inhibitor for them, because of fair use restrictions on image and music use?
Sandy,
I too am interested in learning more about the results of your project with pre-service teachers. At the risk of sounding morbid, I would like to know more about what you called the "moments of doubt when the logistics of handling these projects caused students a fair amount of stress." :-)
I think that we can all gain additional insight into using digital storytelling in our teaching when we share information about the things that didn't go as planned, as well as the things that did.
And as Wesley mentioned, I also am interested finding out how others are dealing with copyright and intellectual property issues. Copyright seems to come up every time I conduct a workshop or make a presentation on DS, and I hope that SITE members can share ideas and strategies for dealing with these thorny issues.
Sandy,
Good to hear more about your work. (I think you may have been among a group who participated in an iChat late last summer that covered a number of topics, including digital stories???) Anyhow, I agree that hearing about the "moments of doubt" could be illuminating for many of us. We all have them, and they more often than not seem like "hours of doubt." Look forward to your roundtable at SITE.
Mikw
thanks to everyone for these responses! I should have checked back sooner.
Concerning copyright issues, we purposefully decided not to post results on the web for this reason. We created a class CD-rom so students could share with each other instead. Many of the students chose trademarked images to go with their stories (not to mention music selected!) and because of time limitations, we did not require them to write for permission, given that this was shared only in class.
My feeling is that permission to use images would be granted in most cases and then perhaps we could publish more online if we built this into the project. I also would like to see more use of original images where possible but again all of this would require more time for production.
Our moments of "doubt" came mostly from trying to handle these large files that were still in production stage (i.e., before compressed into Quicktime movies).
Most students do not own Apple computers and therefore did not have iMovie on their personal computers. We used a mobile laptop cart when students worked in class, but then had to back up the projects on portable hard drives between editing sessions. These laptops are programmed to reimage after shutdown because they are used by a lot of different students. Some students, decided to store their iMovie projects in their network accounts (something we told them NOT to do ... but they did it anyway ... and then we had a hard time recovering these projects because iMovie creates hidden files that don't download --- plus the upload/download time for these files was enormous! Thankfully only a couple of students did this, but that was enough and then they panicked because they thought they had lost all their work and effort. We were able to recover everything, however.
So, the file handling is problematic. Next Fall we plan to offer more options -- allow students who have Windows machines to create projects on their personal computers using MovieMaker, so they can store on their own computers. We still love iMovie and will support students who want to use it as well.
I'm going to look into Photo Story too ... of course, we're looking for ways to do this that don't cost the student anything extra in terms of software.
I'd be interested in learning more about the ways people are handling file managment between editing sessions. Here at the College, we are just looking into a laptop requirement for our students ... which would resolve these equity issues ... but that's a couple of years off, I suspect.
Copyright is a very thorny issue in terms of being able to disseminate via the web. Ideas/thoughts on this would be helpful ... are others encouraging students to create their own images and artwork and music??
Best wishes and I look forward to meeting you at SITE!
--Sandy
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