Digital Storytelling

While I had reservations with the other two forms of technology that we learned about in our EDCI 546 class, I do not about digital storytelling. These issues, by the way, mainly centered around privacy which I think can be overcome. I think digital storytelling is a great educational tool. As Rachel mentioned in class, she had a group of first graders create digital stories using Photo Story 3. I think that children are a lot more technologically advanced than we sometimes give them credit for. However, besides being fun, what are the educational uses for digital storytelling? Well I like the article’s answer of teaching “twenty-first century literacy.” Digital storytelling teaches children many different types of literacy such as information literacy, visual literacy, global literacy and technology literacy. It also gives children a fairly large project and asks them to implement effective time management. One of the hardest parts of digital storytelling, at least in my experience was creating a good storyline. The craft of digital storytelling teaches kids to be good writers without using the dreaded prompt. The teacher could pick one of the three types of digital stories and assign this to the class or he/she could leave the assignment completely open. One of the reasons that I think digital storytelling is so exciting is because it gives a great deal of autonomy to the learner. Historically this has proven to be educationally effective.
I understand the challenges to digital storytelling such as copyright issues or the amount of time that it takes to create one. These are things that I’ve thought about. Sometimes I wonder how a first year teacher would navigate these things with young children. I think that the teacher has to be very hands on. It definitely helps to have created one yourself. Overall, though I think that digital storytelling could be an exciting and effective educational tool.

wikipedias

I think I may have been bitten by the “wiki” bug because I do enjoy our class page. I like the description of a wiki as a “living organism” as put by the Richardson chapter. Although I still have my reservations. When I taught high school in ’07, I told my seniors that they absolutely could not use wikipedia for research in my International Studies class. First, I felt that they needed to have practice doing research because they were a year away from college and wikipedia was not what I had in mind. I’m sure wikipedia is fairly accurate but I wanted them to at least attempt to use some primary source documents. I like what the chapter had to say when it suggested that a student’s excellent research paper could be added to wikipedia for its content. That I could get into.

I tried to log into a couple of wikis suggested by the chapter. The wiki on Alex Rodriguez impressed me, because even though the language wasn’t “proper” (the author used ferschizzle) it had personality. More importantly, you could tell that the author, a sophomore boy, was passionate about his subject and it got him writing. The planet math wiki seemed like an invaluable resource for teachers. According to Richardson it is “a virtual community which aims to help make mathematical knowledge more accessible.” I think if I were to use wikis in elementary school I would definitely do a password-protected one. There are many options and the ones I liked best were the what-I-did-this-summer wikis, sixth grade wikis, book report and poetry wikis. I could easily imagine an elementary school class doing one of these and getting really excited about it.

Ideas for Literacy Blogs

As I discussed in my last blog, blogging has its place. I still am a proponent of blogging as a way toward full self expression when a student has some other physical/emotional impediment that might detract from the power of her words. However, I believe blogging in grades K-12 needs to take place in a blackboard-like setting, as one of my colleagues mentioned. This way safeguarding is ensured. Blogs are a great way to have a communal response to an article. Newsworthy events can potentially be good fodder for blogs, such as elections.

There are many other opportunities for literacy activities with regards to blogs. For example, any 10 year old girl would love to read “Happy Birthday, Addy!” - a book from the American girl collection. After finishing, the student could type out a journal entry in “Addy’s” diary. Maybe the teacher could direct her to imagine all the things she’ll do now that the Civil war is over and she is free. Another student could piggyback on this first entry and blog more thoughts as a sort of a chain letter. Students could write silly poems and stories on their blog. Or they could focus on learning how to write a Haiku. In the case where they were following the phases of the moon for a science project, the student could document his findings on a blog and compare his findings with his peers.

For the most part I see blogs as a positive educational tool but I do believe we should proceed with caution. I would be weary about putting up pictures of students at all. That’s just me. I would be afraid of potential fallout and the unwanted exposure these kids, whom we are supposed to protect, might get. I guess my phrase with regards is “proceed with caution.”