Digital Storytelling in Your Community

After creating my own digital story, I came closest to meeting part a, “Students articulate and set personal learning goals, develop strategies leveraging technology to achieve them and reflect on the learning process itself to improve learning outcomes”, of the Empowered Learner ISTE proficiencies.  I believe that this is the goal that I came closest to meeting because I was able to set my goal of creating my digital story, I was able to create a script and storyboard the shots that I was going to capture in my story.  I also planned out which equipment I would use to create my story.  After my preproduction planning was complete, I was able to capture my story on video with the help of the students in my own classroom and school building.  After the filming process, I was able to edit everything together into a final cut to be shared with others.  During the overall process I was able to learn from what worked well as well as from the areas that were a bit problematic, so that the next time I need to create a project like this, I will understand how to get around those issues a little easier.

During the creation of my story, I had the opportunity to explore new applications and resources that I could use with my students to help engage them in the creation of their own digital stories.  As someone who uses digital storytelling as a tool in the classroom every single day, I know for a fact that my school community and other students would benefit from learning these skills.  Creating digital stories allows students to create, collaborate, reflect on what is and what is not working through their processes, problem-solve, and have fun learning in a new way.  Students in my school community already have the opportunity to market products that they are working on in other courses, share positive experiences that are happening in our building with the district and local community through our website and YouTube channel, and collaborate with students from other schools through various short film competitions.  Digital storytelling allows our community to become empowered learners because, through our sharing of our stories with each other, we can learn about our community and how to create stories that our community needs to share.  We can have conversations with each other about our stories and teach each other new ways that we can use technology to create our stories. 

Research proves that the creation of digital storytelling allows students to engage in learning by using their own choice and voice in the creation of their stories in an authentic way.  Davis and Foley describe the creation of digital stories as a way that the authors, in this case, students, can use their voice, allowing them to reflect on their learning experience by sharing their stories with others getting feedback from their audience, and allowing them to learn through design and production (323).  Kubravi, Shah, and Jan discuss how digital storytelling can be used as an assessment tool by educators to show student achievement in academics.  They discuss how the creation of digital stories requires students to use planning methods, language, and writing to create meaningful scripts that show that they have researched and understand their topics, collaborative learning techniques by working together as a team to create their voice which in turn allows them to be motivated to share their learning with others (789-790).

The authentic audience for my story would be other educators who are having a hard time letting go of the control of their classroom and giving that control over the learning to their students to help raise academic achievement rates, just as the research suggests.  I think that the newer and the more veteran teachers in my building/district would be most impacted by my story.  I believe that my story might resonate with them and encourage them to try new things in their classroom with their students. Playing the role of a facilitator and being there to assist on the technical side of things has allowed me to see that truly letting go of control has extremely positive consequences.  I am unbelievably lucky to get to watch all of the learning and fun unfold, and hope that other educators in my community can find joy in this type of student learning too.  

References:  

Davis, A. & Foley, L. (2016). Digital Storytelling. In Handbook of research on the societal impact of digital media, 317-342. IGI Global

Kubravi, S. U., Shah, S. O., & Jan, K. (2018). Digital story telling: The impact on student academic achievement, critical thinking and learning motivation. International Journal of Research in Engineering, Science and Management, 1(12), 787-791.