Digital Storytelling -

I feel as if I have been using digital story telling since I first discovered sights like “Edheads.org”. Even prior to having a Smart board I would set my students up on a learning center in my classroom or in a computer lab on either of these sites, and allow them to follow a lesson and activity. I feel that “Edheads.org” followed the element of digital story telling that the article referred to as economy. Economy being “to simply put, using just enough content to tell the story without overloading the viewer with too much information. “ Edheads always starts their activities or lessons with a brief but extremely concise overview or story about the topic. Their language is very consistent with what I use in my classroom so it has always made sense for me to use it as a complimentary piece to what I was teaching or a segway into a new topic.

Another element of digital story telling that I have I have also been using over this past year is dramatic question. A dramatic question is “a question that will be answered by the end of the story.” Recently my class used Comic Life to create their own dramatic questions. It was a long process but at the start they choose a type of word problem (percents, multiplication, division, or fraction) they wanted to solve. Next they choose the comic characters they wanted in their comic solving the problem. We had Optimus Prime turning fractions into percents to save his fellow Auto bots, Sponge Bob teaching Patrick about the importance of knowing his multiplication tables, and many more. I must say that this by far anyway was the best product my students produced all year and was certainly a worthy learning experience. Outside of it reeling in students who are typically disengaged, it was also a more enriching math experience. My students really needed to understand the math if they were going to have a comic character solve the equation.