I Love to Tell the Story, now in HD

Digital storytelling is the combined use of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic elements, including video, audio, text, pictures, and illustrations, to create a story for presentation. It is a medium that benefits both teachers and students. Teachers can use this format to illustrate certain topics, to present material in a more engaging way to students, to use as preparatory reading for lectures or tutorials, and to share thoughts and lesson plans with colleagues the world over. Students receive from this format the ability to collaborate on work, the opportunity to explore themes and research more obscure events, the chance to reflect on their own experiences and understand themselves in the context of the wider world, and the impetus to explore their own creativity.

I found it interesting that some studies have shown that digital storytelling and reusable learning objects seem to be more effective in motivating student attitudes and performance when used to introduce concepts rather than reviewing them. I absolutely find the use of digital storytelling to be appropriate for my teaching. I have used short videos from YouTube in classes to put a concept or event into visual and audio form. That is the way I like to learn, and I do that for those learners in class as well. I like to use videos that have been made by students to showcase to my students how they are relatively simple to make and put out into the digital landscape. Whenever they criticize one for not being good, I challenge them to improve upon that person's work.

The two examples of digital storytelling I reviewed were the Gettysburg Address and President Kennedy's "Race to the Moon" speech. I feel that both would be appropriate for school. I preferred the first video because it presented some concept for the events surrounding the Gettysburg Address and also provided applications for students to explore the larger context of the Civil War and its effects on the nation. It also used relevant photographs, paintings, and illustrations to accompany the audio text of the speech, as the original delivery obviously took place long before video technology existed. The Kennedy speech production was good, but it provided no context for the event, so those unfamiliar with it were likely to remain so. While it had relevant pictures to accompany the audio text of the speech, it made no use of the actual video of the speech, which I know exists because one of my students used in a presentation on Kennedy.