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Guide to Producing Student Digital Storytellers

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Guide to Producing Student Digital Storytellers

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Edsurge Article

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Everyone tells stories: journalists, politicians, scientists and entrepreneurs. Conveying information in a coherent and compelling way is vital to success in the real world, and it's our job as educators to prepare our students to share their ideas in effective ways.

We used to do this with papers, posters and dioramas, but digital tools at our disposal now allow students to create authentic stories that allow for audience interaction and a wider impact on the world. Here are some tips for transforming storytelling assignments in your classroom, no matter what subject or grade level you teach.

What is Digital Storytelling?

Digital storytelling uses video, audio, social media, blogging and other tools to convey ideas and information effectively. The emphasis is on empowering students to create authentic products that they can share with others beyond the classroom walls, and to allow for audience interaction and feedback. And so, why should we inspire students to be digital storytellers? Here are five key reasons:

Requires critical thinking: Creating an interdisciplinary product from scratch requires high level thinking skills like evaluating evidence, editing and curation, and production timelines. Digital stories often use multiple skills like writing, public speaking, photography, design and collaboration in a single project which makes them ideal for practicing skills learned other units or classes.

Authentic projects have impact: Creating real-world, impactful products that students share with an audience beyond the classroom is one of the best ways to enhance motivation and increase quality. Parents, colleagues and administrators can also see the great work being done in your classroom.

Places focus on writing: A picture is worth a thousand words, and video is 30 photos a second. It has its own grammar and style, but concepts of content, structure, tone and audience impact are just as important in multimedia as they are for an essay. Scripts, voiceovers and interview questions emphasize traditional writing skills and are the backbone of all multimedia projects.

Develops digital citizens: What to post online, when and how are all important questions for our students to learn to answer. Require them to comment on others' work and develop etiquette for online posts and feedback. Rather than being afraid of the internet, embrace it to teach digital citizenship.

Students can add to digital portfolios: All student work can be compiled into a digital portfolio that they can use to promote themselves for jobs/internships, for a self-evaluation tool or for teachers to track student progress.

Is this student-directed learning all it's cracked up to be? Yes--it turns out that many teachers want it and are looking for it.

Out of the top ten favorite edtech tools chosen by educators in 2015,* five of them were chosen because they "allowed student independence" or "captured student engagement."

* TEACHERS KNOW BEST, 2015

How to Educate Digital Storytellers

1. Focus on content, not the tools

It's always about the ideas, not the technology. Apps and hardware change rapidly, so its important to not fixate on gear that might be obsolete in 12 months. It's true that the medium affects the message (video is much different than Twitter, for example), but begin with what students want to convey, then choose the appropriate platform(s) to do that. That being said, some of my favorite apps for digital storytelling include: iMovie for iOS ($4.99, free with new iOS device), Storehouse (free), Creative Book Builder ($3.99), and StoryCorps (free).

2. Take it to the next "SAMR level"

There are many ways teachers use technology, and some are more transformational than others. The SAMR model is a way to gauge how deeply and effectively you use technology, and in this case, how tech can transform how we tell stories.

Take advantage of the unique aspects of digital storytelling and multimedia tools to transform learning, rather than just replace old analogue models. These include collaboration, audience feedback, interactivity, and video and audio. Consider a blog with links, and share posts via social media, or publishing a collaborative ebook that collects student projects around a theme. Require students to leave comments and feedback on online posts.

3. Develop expectations and outcomes

What do you want to accomplish? And what volume/frequency/quality of work do you expect from your students? Push students to their limits by requiring them to utilize multiple media in each project.

For a high school media project that explored Surrealism, I had students create short videos over a period of several weeks, then compile them into a cohesive "story" that added other elements like text, photos and additional video. Rather than focus on technical aspects (which I covered in earlier projects), this one was all about story, interpretation, and demonstrating an understanding of Surrealism. ( See PDF of the project here.)

4. Start small

It can take time for students to master a particular skill or for teachers to develop effective storytelling projects, so don't take on too much with your first assignments. Increase the difficulty of the project by slowly adding complicated media like video or audio to assignments. Like any assignment, scaffold skills and techniques over time so that they build on one another to increase complexity.

5. Evaluate early on and often

Share your rubrics and expectations early in the process, and be realistic about student outcomes for both content and technical achievement. Have separate evaluations for content and technique, and reward originality and audience interaction. It's a good idea to have multiple forms of evaluations, including self-evaluations, class critiques, and teacher oral and written feedback.

Subject-Specific Ideas for Digital Storytelling

English Language Arts: Create a video poem or photo montage as a visual interpretation of an existing poem being studied by the class. Rather than a literal interpretation, consider visual metaphors and interpret what colors, sounds or locations might associate with a particular phrase. Post the work on a public platform (blog, social media site, etc) and encourage students to leave comments.

Next level: Use Storehouse to create an interactive gallery for their work.

Science: Document scientific phenomena in the field and present the data and findings in a coherent and compelling way. This could be published in a class iBook or blog.

Next level: Collaborate with students at another school in a different city, state or country to compare/contrast findings from their respective locations.

Social Studies: A visual anthropology project where students create a visual documentation of changes in your community. Students use photography, video or sound to record older family members' reactions to changes in specific elements of local history.

Next level: Collect all content and publish it as an interactive iBook.

Digital storytelling is a great way for students to share their ideas and demonstrate their knowledge. Rather than a test or an essay that no one really cares about, students now have the ability to creatively engage the world through authentic projects--and that makes everyone more excited to teach and learn.

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A Guide to Producing Student Digital Storytellers - EdSurge News

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Everyone tells stories: journalists, politicians, scientists and entrepreneurs. Conveying information in a coherent and compelling way is vital to ...

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https://starfishproject.com/

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When it comes to evaluating information that flows across social channels or pops up in a Google search, young and otherwise digital-savvy students can easily be duped, finds a new report from researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education.

The report, released this week by the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), shows a dismaying inability by students to reason about information they see on the Internet, the authors said. Students, for example, had a hard time distinguishing advertisements from news articles or identifying where information came from.

"Many people assume that because young people are fluent in social media they are equally perceptive about what they find there," said Professor Sam Wineburg, the lead author of the report and founder of SHEG. "Our work shows the opposite to be true."

The researchers began their work in January 2015, well before the most recent debates over fake news and its influence on the presidential election.

The scholars tackled the question of "civic online reasoning" because there were few ways to assess how students evaluate online information and to identify approaches to teach the skills necessary to distinguish credible sources from unreliable ones.

The authors worry that democracy is threatened by the ease at which disinformation about civic issues is allowed to spread and flourish.

"Many of the materials on web credibility were state-of-the-art in 1999. So much has changed but many schools are stuck in the past," said Joel Breakstone, the director of SHEG, which has designed social studies curriculum that teaches students how to evaluate primary sources. That curriculum has been downloaded 3.5 million times, and is used by several school districts.

The new report covered news literacy, as well as students' ability to judge Facebook and Twitter feeds, comments left in readers' forums on news sites, blog posts, photographs and other digital messages that shape public opinion.

The assessments reflected key understandings the students should possess such as being able to find out who wrote a story and whether that source is credible. The authors drew on the expertise of teachers, university researchers, librarians and news experts to come up with 15 age-appropriate tests -- five each for middle school, high school and college levels.

"In every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students' lack of preparation," the authors wrote.

In middle school they tested basic skills, such as the trustworthiness of different tweets or articles.

One assessment required middle schoolers to explain why they might not trust an article on financial planning that was written by a bank executive and sponsored by a bank. The researchers found that many students did not cite authorship or article sponsorship as key reasons for not believing the article.

Another assessment had middle school students look at the homepage of Slate. They were asked to identify certain bits of content as either news stories or advertisements. The students were able to identify a traditional ad -- one with a coupon code -- from a news story pretty easily. But of the 203 students surveyed, more than 80 percent believed a native ad, identified with the words "sponsored content," was a real news story.

At the high school level, one assessment tested whether students were familiar with key social media conventions, including the blue checkmark that indicates an account was verified as legitimate by Twitter and Facebook.

Students were asked to evaluate two Facebook posts announcing Donald Trump's candidacy for president. One was from the verified Fox News account and the other was from an account that looked like Fox News. Only a quarter of the students recognized and explained the significance of the blue checkmark. And over 30 percent of students argued that the fake account was more trustworthy because of some key graphic elements that it included.

"This finding indicates that students may focus more on the content of social media posts than on their sources," the authors wrote. "Despite their fluency with social media, many students are unaware of basic conventions for indicating verified digital information."

The assessments at the college level focused on more complex reasoning. Researchers required students to evaluate information they received from Google searches, contending that open Internet searches turn up contradictory results that routinely mix fact with falsehood.

For one task, students had to determine whether Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, believed in state-sponsored euthanasia. A typical Google search shows dozens of websites addressing the topic from opposite angles.

"Making sense of search results is even more challenging with politically charged topics," the researchers said. "A digitally literate student has the knowledge and skill to wade through mixed results to find reliable and accurate information."

In another assessment, college students had to evaluate website credibility. The researchers found that high production values, links to reputable news organizations and polished "About" pages had the ability to sway students into believing without very much skepticism the contents of the site.

The assessments were administered to students across 12 states. In total, the researchers collected and analyzed 7,804 student responses. Field-testing included under-resourced schools in Los Angeles and well-resourced schools in the Minneapolis suburbs. College assessments were administered at six different universities.

Wineburg says the next steps to this research include helping educators use these tasks to track student understanding and to adjust instruction. He also envisions developing curriculum for teachers, and the Stanford History Education Group has already begun to pilot lesson plans in local high schools. Finally, the researchers hope to produce videos showing the depth of the problem and demonstrating the link between digital literacy and informed citizenship.

"As recent headlines demonstrate, this work is more important now than ever," Wineburg said. "In the coming months, we look forward to sharing our assessments and working with educators to create materials that will help young people navigate the sea of disinformation they encounter online."

The research was funded by a grant from the Robert R. McCormick Foundation. Besides Breakstone and Wineburg, co-authors included Stanford researchers Sarah McGrew and Teresa Ortega.

An executive summary of the report is available here.

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Stanford researchers find students have trouble judging the credibility of information online

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When it comes to evaluating information that flows across social channels or pops up in a Google search, young and otherwise digital-savvy students can easily be duped, finds a new report from researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education.

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Visual Vocabulary

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Visual Vocabulary Design by Mike Lewis on iBooks

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Read a free sample or buy Visual Vocabulary Design by Mike Lewis. You can read this book with iBooks on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Mac.

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Art & Visual Literacy

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Tips, How-To's, Examples and Best Practices

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Resources for how to use storytelling in classrooms of all grade levels and subject areas. For more info visit www.michael-hernandez.net

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From Edutopia

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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Digital Storytelling and Social Justice 

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Digital Storytelling and Social Justice 

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From the International Literacy Association

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COVER STORY 18 November/December 2016 | LITERACY TODAY y knowledge is only as big as the bus window, but these traditions are ancient." This beautifully poeti...