“The digital storytelling process… allows students to hone their
critical thinking skills, develop their visual and digital literacy
skills, and improve their writing skills, all while deepening their
engagement with historical narratives.”
I omitted a small portion of the above quote so as to not take up too much space. What was omitted the line about including within your presentation a detailed script, historically backed research, and an engaging presentation style. The aim of this type of teaching is to provide a way to give valuable feedback to students in classes with a large amount of enrolled students. Through their own assignment and their peers assignments they found a higher level of engagement from their students. To put it simply, the art of telling a story/teaching through technology/social media or other “non-scholarly” methods leads to higher enjoyment from the students.
“Digital storytelling can take several forms, including
web-based stories, hypertexts, podcasts, video clips, or even computer games.”
The next section of the chapter goes over the process the author used for their students. They were given a chance to post in forums to form their groups and get to know each other and told to present a project as a documentary, as long as it is a concept not presented in class. The students met in class for their first workshop and were told what primary and secondary sources were, along with being shown what a good project looked like via example. After being let loose, the first roadblock students encountered was the job of narrowing down a research topic. In my own experience this is always the hardest step. To see either a list of topics available or to be told to “go wild” means you must weigh the pros and cons of each choice. Being in a group like this allows for multiple voices to be heard and, again in my experience, allows for a quicker decision on the topic of choice. The project allowed for students to remain engaged throughout the 3 month process.
“Most students indicated that they were motivated by the project and put in effort in ways that they had not previously applied to other scholarly pursuits”
The biggest issue I see with this project is actually tackled within the chapter. Freedom to choose whatever means a high chance of overlapping content and rough group communication. But the author goes on to say that the groups were able to quickly resolve most issues they ran into regarding communications, and with later iterations of the project they were given a few parameters to work with to decide what their projects would be about. Overall, these types of projects seem best for student learning.
