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Digital Storytelling
Storytelling.
I’m no expert on history – but to me storytelling has been around as long as people have had a voice and a tale to tell. Even drawings on cave walls were stories, though the voice wasn’t audible and maybe the language not as defined.
Our textbook says “the word ‘storytelling’ connotes something primitive, even childlike. It brings to mind sitting around a campfire being delightfully frightened by a ghost story, or sitting on a rug in kindergarten listening to classmates show and tell” (Diaz & Fields, 2007). Campfire stories and “story times” I’ll give them as being childlike, and well, I suppose you could call our cave-dwellers’ drawings primitive. But I see storytelling as neither of these descriptors.
According to my friend Megan Almon, a seminary student and leader of our weekly Bible study, much of the Old Testament of the Bible was passed down from generation to generation through oral retelling. Yes, eventually someone wrote everything down, but for many, many years the Bible was passed down through storytelling (M.Almon, personal communication, November 12, 2009). Some of the recitation may have leaned more towards formal oral history; but I’m betting that some of the stories like Moses parting the Red Sea, Noah and the ark, Joseph and his brothers, and Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son Isaac were told with some passion and dramatic inflection.
Being a born and bred Georgia girl, I think of storytelling as a southern thing. My mind conjures up pictures of Mark Twain spinning a tale of mischief and humor; Lewis Grizzard relating a history of growing up in a small, southern town; or Uncle Remus (Joel Chandler Harris) relating the antics of Brer Rabbit. All of these men I see speaking aloud, in front of a rapt and adoring audience – and how I wish I could have been among them.
A Google search, however, tells me that I am wrong. Yes, there is a strong storytelling presence in the south. The Magnolia Storytelling Festival at the Bulloch House in Roswell, GA and the Smokey Mountains Storytelling Festival in Pigeon Forge, TN are both well-known. But there are festivals in California, Utah, New York, Connecticut, Nebraska, Texas, and even Manila. Storytelling is universal!
What is also universal is how to tell a good story. From our earliest days of elementary school we are taught to both listen and to create. The Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) puts these more succinctly than I could, so the “Seven Elements of Digital Storytelling” are:
1. “Point of View
2. A Dramatic Question
3. Emotional Content
4. The Gift of Your Voice
5. The Power of the Soundtrack
6. Economy
7. Pacing” (University of Houston, 2009).
Except for maybe the soundtrack, these are not new steps. Every creative writing classes, scriptwriting classes, even my dad the newspaper publisher, have all stressed (in some way or another) the critical elements to a good story. And honestly, the scriptwriting classes tell you to think about the soundtrack too, so that’s not new either.
So the question is not how can we use digital storytelling in schools, but how can we not use it in schools. Digital storytelling is just the latest medium in the storytelling timeline. We have progressed from drawing on cave walls with berries and sticks to the pen and pencil to the printing press to the typewriter to the computer to electronic sound and video files. Of course, through all of this, oral storytelling has never gone away, but I’ll stick with digital storytelling for now.
The aspect of digital storytelling that I think would appeal to educators (it certainly does to this future educator) is that it speaks to so many learning styles. The University of Houston’s site (2009) also mentions this. Students who learn through writing can create their own script, or storyboard as we are doing for our project. Students who learn visually will see the images or video telling the story. Students who learn best through auditory means can use the soundtrack to get their point across. Artistic students, well, they’ll just have it all. And I even believe that students who learn kinetically can still thrive through the movement and potential action or animation through the story. It is a win, win, win, win, win situation.
Then too, students are learning to communicate, to create, to think about their audience; while they are also learning writing skills, art skills, technology, and information gathering.
Maybe it is because I simply love language and stories, almost regardless of the presentation style. But I believe digital storytelling is an amazing tool, and one I can’t wait to learn more about myself.
Ebooks
I don’t have an iPhone or even an iPod. My friends have told me they love reading books on their Kindle, but I confess I don’t know what one looks like or how it works. I have used http://www.austen.com/ to read Pride and Prejudice for probably the tenth or twelfth time, but that was because a fellow Jane Austen fan found the site and we decided to read a chapter a day just to get a different perspective of the book. I highly recommend it!
To say I have nothing against ebooks would probably be an understatement. I strongly support anything that helps a person develop a love of literature. And far be it for me to dictate the method one chooses to read a book. I’m currently listening to Hugh Laurie read Great Expectations and marveling that this man plays “House” every week on television. Listening to the first Dickens book I ever read is also stirring up my need to read every Charles Dickens book ever written and finish my quest to read the entire Narnia series and Jane Austen’s works.
So I readily admit that different formats are perfectly wonderful.
To me though, there is something about the weight of a book in your hands. There was a joy in the weight, the heft, of holding that last Harry Potter book in my hands the day it arrived that was comforting – even if it was the last time. I even love inexpensive paperbacks that you can bend all the way back and just see one side at a time, sitting in a lounge chair on a beach. I read Sense and Sensibility for the first time this way two months ago. (But don’t worry, I always buy cheap paperback books for the beach.)
Still, as I said, I will take stories any way I can get them. And on the Guttenberg site, I saw a long list of Louisa May Alcott stories that I need to investigate. I might even download Eight Cousins, because it’s my favorite and I like to have as many copies of it as possible.
One thing I appreciated about the Guttenberg site was the books in various languages. How helpful that would be to a school with a small budget that doesn’t have a lot of money for ESOL materials. Students could read books in Spanish to help with some of their language arts assignments. This was true of the International Children’s Digital Library site too, and I think it is an amazing resource.
My favorite parts of the International Children’s site are the amazing graphics and the fact that you can see the book covers and the actual pages with illustrations. I got hooked in the Award Winners section and loved the artwork for The Cricket Who Could Not Sing.
My (field experience) media center does not circulate ebooks, although I’m certainly going to share these sites with my mentor after the Thanksgiving holidays. We do however use electronic resources, the primary one being GALILEO. She will start teaching GALILEO to the classes beginning in January. And even though I’ve heard Dr. Child teach GALILEO for the last two years and I’ve used it countless times in my media classes; I always learn something new whenever I hear her teach or search for a new topic. It is truly an wonderful resource.
So I guess you can say that my eyes have been opened. Not that I was ever against ebooks, but I can certainly see more uses for them – especially when you can get free ebooks in today’s budget-terrorized schools. I can also see them appealing to students who prefer technology to paper, or even audio to reading. I did notice a few of the Gutenberg titles were audio, and this would help students with vision impairments. This can also be said of the fact that the International ebooks can be magnified.
I’ll still always love holding a book in my hands, but now I’m curious about the world of ebooks. Does anyone know where I can find a Kindle?
Diaz, K., & Fields, A.M. (2007). Digital storytelling, libraries, and community. In N. Courtney(Ed.), Library 2.0 and beyond: Innovative Technologies and tomorrow’s user (pp. 129-139). Westport, Connecticut: Libraries Unlimited.
University of Houston. (2009). The Educational uses of digital storytelling. Retrieved from http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/index.html
Storytelling.
I’m no expert on history – but to me storytelling has been around as long as people have had a voice and a tale to tell. Even drawings on cave walls were stories, though the voice wasn’t audible and maybe the language not as defined.
Our textbook says “the word ‘storytelling’ connotes something primitive, even childlike. It brings to mind sitting around a campfire being delightfully frightened by a ghost story, or sitting on a rug in kindergarten listening to classmates show and tell” (Diaz & Fields, 2007). Campfire stories and “story times” I’ll give them as being childlike, and well, I suppose you could call our cave-dwellers’ drawings primitive. But I see storytelling as neither of these descriptors.
According to my friend Megan Almon, a seminary student and leader of our weekly Bible study, much of the Old Testament of the Bible was passed down from generation to generation through oral retelling. Yes, eventually someone wrote everything down, but for many, many years the Bible was passed down through storytelling (M.Almon, personal communication, November 12, 2009). Some of the recitation may have leaned more towards formal oral history; but I’m betting that some of the stories like Moses parting the Red Sea, Noah and the ark, Joseph and his brothers, and Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son Isaac were told with some passion and dramatic inflection.
Being a born and bred Georgia girl, I think of storytelling as a southern thing. My mind conjures up pictures of Mark Twain spinning a tale of mischief and humor; Lewis Grizzard relating a history of growing up in a small, southern town; or Uncle Remus (Joel Chandler Harris) relating the antics of Brer Rabbit. All of these men I see speaking aloud, in front of a rapt and adoring audience – and how I wish I could have been among them.
A Google search, however, tells me that I am wrong. Yes, there is a strong storytelling presence in the south. The Magnolia Storytelling Festival at the Bulloch House in Roswell, GA and the Smokey Mountains Storytelling Festival in Pigeon Forge, TN are both well-known. But there are festivals in California, Utah, New York, Connecticut, Nebraska, Texas, and even Manila. Storytelling is universal!
What is also universal is how to tell a good story. From our earliest days of elementary school we are taught to both listen and to create. The Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) puts these more succinctly than I could, so the “Seven Elements of Digital Storytelling” are:
1. “Point of View
2. A Dramatic Question
3. Emotional Content
4. The Gift of Your Voice
5. The Power of the Soundtrack
6. Economy
7. Pacing” (University of Houston, 2009).
Except for maybe the soundtrack, these are not new steps. Every creative writing classes, scriptwriting classes, even my dad the newspaper publisher, have all stressed (in some way or another) the critical elements to a good story. And honestly, the scriptwriting classes tell you to think about the soundtrack too, so that’s not new either.
So the question is not how can we use digital storytelling in schools, but how can we not use it in schools. Digital storytelling is just the latest medium in the storytelling timeline. We have progressed from drawing on cave walls with berries and sticks to the pen and pencil to the printing press to the typewriter to the computer to electronic sound and video files. Of course, through all of this, oral storytelling has never gone away, but I’ll stick with digital storytelling for now.
The aspect of digital storytelling that I think would appeal to educators (it certainly does to this future educator) is that it speaks to so many learning styles. The University of Houston’s site (2009) also mentions this. Students who learn through writing can create their own script, or storyboard as we are doing for our project. Students who learn visually will see the images or video telling the story. Students who learn best through auditory means can use the soundtrack to get their point across. Artistic students, well, they’ll just have it all. And I even believe that students who learn kinetically can still thrive through the movement and potential action or animation through the story. It is a win, win, win, win, win situation.
Then too, students are learning to communicate, to create, to think about their audience; while they are also learning writing skills, art skills, technology, and information gathering.
Maybe it is because I simply love language and stories, almost regardless of the presentation style. But I believe digital storytelling is an amazing tool, and one I can’t wait to learn more about myself.
Ebooks
I don’t have an iPhone or even an iPod. My friends have told me they love reading books on their Kindle, but I confess I don’t know what one looks like or how it works. I have used http://www.austen.com/ to read Pride and Prejudice for probably the tenth or twelfth time, but that was because a fellow Jane Austen fan found the site and we decided to read a chapter a day just to get a different perspective of the book. I highly recommend it!
To say I have nothing against ebooks would probably be an understatement. I strongly support anything that helps a person develop a love of literature. And far be it for me to dictate the method one chooses to read a book. I’m currently listening to Hugh Laurie read Great Expectations and marveling that this man plays “House” every week on television. Listening to the first Dickens book I ever read is also stirring up my need to read every Charles Dickens book ever written and finish my quest to read the entire Narnia series and Jane Austen’s works.
So I readily admit that different formats are perfectly wonderful.
To me though, there is something about the weight of a book in your hands. There was a joy in the weight, the heft, of holding that last Harry Potter book in my hands the day it arrived that was comforting – even if it was the last time. I even love inexpensive paperbacks that you can bend all the way back and just see one side at a time, sitting in a lounge chair on a beach. I read Sense and Sensibility for the first time this way two months ago. (But don’t worry, I always buy cheap paperback books for the beach.)
Still, as I said, I will take stories any way I can get them. And on the Guttenberg site, I saw a long list of Louisa May Alcott stories that I need to investigate. I might even download Eight Cousins, because it’s my favorite and I like to have as many copies of it as possible.
One thing I appreciated about the Guttenberg site was the books in various languages. How helpful that would be to a school with a small budget that doesn’t have a lot of money for ESOL materials. Students could read books in Spanish to help with some of their language arts assignments. This was true of the International Children’s Digital Library site too, and I think it is an amazing resource.
My favorite parts of the International Children’s site are the amazing graphics and the fact that you can see the book covers and the actual pages with illustrations. I got hooked in the Award Winners section and loved the artwork for The Cricket Who Could Not Sing.
My (field experience) media center does not circulate ebooks, although I’m certainly going to share these sites with my mentor after the Thanksgiving holidays. We do however use electronic resources, the primary one being GALILEO. She will start teaching GALILEO to the classes beginning in January. And even though I’ve heard Dr. Child teach GALILEO for the last two years and I’ve used it countless times in my media classes; I always learn something new whenever I hear her teach or search for a new topic. It is truly an wonderful resource.
So I guess you can say that my eyes have been opened. Not that I was ever against ebooks, but I can certainly see more uses for them – especially when you can get free ebooks in today’s budget-terrorized schools. I can also see them appealing to students who prefer technology to paper, or even audio to reading. I did notice a few of the Gutenberg titles were audio, and this would help students with vision impairments. This can also be said of the fact that the International ebooks can be magnified.
I’ll still always love holding a book in my hands, but now I’m curious about the world of ebooks. Does anyone know where I can find a Kindle?
Diaz, K., & Fields, A.M. (2007). Digital storytelling, libraries, and community. In N. Courtney(Ed.), Library 2.0 and beyond: Innovative Technologies and tomorrow’s user (pp. 129-139). Westport, Connecticut: Libraries Unlimited.
University of Houston. (2009). The Educational uses of digital storytelling. Retrieved from http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/index.html
Holly--- I agree with you that I enjoy reading books but that joy includes holding that book in my hand. Of course, I am not a digital native and I feel that we need to reach those digital students on their playing field. Anything that has a hint of technology inspires these type students.
This digital storytelling kit will reach students on their level but it will also ease the worry on those teachers who are not technology savvy. I am excited to be able to create this for my students. I want the students to concentrate on their product not searching for information and images. I do feel that students need to be able to research and create projects but this kit just adds a different touch to a project.
You are right that story telling has been around forever. It will continue to be here forever, what is a movie after all but the director telling a story.
Also, your thoughts on eBook are so funny! I have never used a Kindle either! But I don't think I want to. There is something about holding a book and sitting out by the pool on a summer day...wouldn't want to do that with a Kindle. My library actually has several ebooks that we got free from Follett and from the Guttenberg Project for a student who is confined to a wheel chair. But, he doesn't want to read the eBooks, he wants the real thing!! Even though it is harder for him to manage, he'd rather have the traditional book. Interesting isn't it?
Holly,
Amazing insight! There certainly is something to be said for the actual holding of the book in one's hands. I confess, I even like the smell of old books. The tradition and history that those books possess definitely peaks my curiosity and interest. However, as media specialists and teachers, it is true that we need to "move with the times" if we want to appeal to the interests of today's youth. Digital storytelling is certainly a wonderful way to catch the interest of those students who enjoy technology, but "hate" the idea of sitting with a book in hand. To those students the prospect of being able to "read" a story digitally is much more exciting and interesting. It is because of this that I am a proponent of E-books. I want to encourage students to read--in whatever way possible!
Digital storytelling is a magnificent way to appeal to students at all academic levels. For those students who like to be creative, creating a digital story like we are doing in class is a wonderful way to "let them shine" and express their creative side, while learning important lessons/information. It is true that many teachers are hesitant to use the new technologies available for teaching and storytelling. Perhaps they are too afraid to learn the new tools, or maybe they have a preconceived notion that (as Dr. Bennett mentioned in class) digital storytelling "takes too much time" out of an already busy schedule. However, I firmly believe that if more teachers would have an open mind and willingness to learn and give digital storytelling a try, they would see exceptional results from their students!