Digital Storytelling

This week's assignment was, "Upload your group's completed digital story & embed into your blog post. Reflect on the process of creating the digital story. How could digital storytelling be used in your classroom/subject area?"



We had a fantastic time working on creating a visual story to go along with a story told by Utah Phillips, a labor activist and folk musician.

One interesting facet was effectively dividing the workload so that four people could be productive at the same time. This worked well during the image-gathering stage but was less effective when we began editing. Also, when we were searching for images, some people got distracted and ended up watching videos of people getting kicked in the testes (let me use the biological term since I do teach biology) for quite awhile on youtube.

I edited the original image times to match up with the story on iMovie. This version and some of the images we collected were later lost, so John was nice enough to put something similar back together for us. Since we had limited time, we were only able to get the pictures to align with the story about two-thirds of the way through. It was very obvious when the pictures and words became out of synch, and it was therefore very interesting to see how much information was conveyed and how powerful it was when the images and audio did work together.

Another interesting point was that different people felt that very different images were key to conveying an idea. Some people were more literalist, wanting images of strongmen and martial arts to represent a powerful blow, while others tended to more abstract representations of power like lightning and tornadoes. It was a good way of bringing into focus the important of knowing an audience, what associations different images are likely to have, and to what extent these assocations can be considered common or "universal" within an audience.

This storytelling approach could be taken in some of the more creative projects in biology. For example, some students benefit from taking a complex process like photosynthesis and making the parts into characters, and the steps into a story. Narrative is of course very powerful, and a digital story could be made along those lines.