Storytelling is something that has existed in our world since before written history. It was a way of passing on knowledge to generations. Today, storytelling exists in a variety of forms. When you read a newspaper, each article tells a story of some topic, telling you a factual account of what is going on in today’s world. When you listen to your grandmother tell you what it was like growing up in the depression, you experience another form of storytelling. An author, carefully construction a word and scenario to be combined into a novel for readers to enjoy, partakes in the act of storytelling. Elementary school students, working diligently to put together their first ‘published’ creative writing piece, are also participating in the wonders of storytelling. Now, in the digital age, these stories, whether factual or fictional in nature, can be brought to life in a completely different way.
This well-known quotation is one I constantly think about when I am involved in a classroom. While I do not have a classroom of my own just yet, I have had many opportunities to see how my role as a teacher can impact students. It is not a new idea in education that children are not simply empty vessels to be filled with whatever knowledge we decide, but living, breathing, thinking young minds, who have a lot to bring to the table. While ‘hands on’ activities may seem desirable, they often fall under the “show me” portion of the proverb. The idea of hands on, minds on learning provides students with the opportunity to become actively involved. Digital storytelling, whether the teacher is leading or the students themselves create their own ‘stories’, is a prime example of hands on, minds on authentic involvement.
While I had never heard this term until I started graduate school and the University of Central Florida, I knew immediately it was something I wanted to incorporate into my curriculum once I had a classroom of my own. I recently began thinking about how one of my unit plans during my internship could have been improved with the addition of digital storytelling into its framework. I designed and implemented, in a second grade classroom, a unit plan on plants. I was already thinking outside of the box and used the required curriculum for this particular topic as a foundation for the differentiated unit plan I designed. I created learning stations, SMART board presentations, and authentic assessments that provided the students with choices and also attended to their individual needs and learning styles. My SMART board presentations, like the one on fruit, could have been brought to life with digital storytelling and the integration of video, audio, student work, and other digital resources. While my students remembered with the presentation, the engaging digital story could have provided them with a better opportunity to understand.
For the final assessment of the unit, I asked my student to choose from one of four writing projects. Each student could have written an acrostic poem, a song, a non-fiction ‘text’ or a “Diary” fiction tale, about the life cycle of a plant. Many of my students chose to do the “Diary of a Plant” (This option was inspired by my noticing their enjoyment of the “Diary of a _____” books by Doreen Cronin.) Now looking back on this assessment through the lens of digital storytelling, I could have guided the students in the creation of their own digital stories about plant lifecycles. The results from the original assessment were fantastic. Students really showed their creativity and what ideas they took away from the unit. (There was one story about a seed who didn’t want to “grow up” to be a rose written by a particularly clever second grader that was quite entertaining.) But thinking about how that story could have gone further with the incorporation of real images of plants, music and sound effects, as well as even video, makes me wish I could do the unit plan all over again. Children have so much creativity waiting to be released, and introducing students, yes even second graders, to digital storytelling can have such positive and memorable results.
