In the beginning...
...there was a syllabus. Pages upon pages of information, requirements, and resources. There was also a young teacher, savvy to and comfortable living in the digital age. Holding the syllabus in her hands, flipping page by page, highlighting and underlining, growing more overwhelmed with every sentence, the young teacher grew less and less confident about her digital capabilities. Armed with only a syllabus, the skeleton of a blog, and her own wits this young teacher bravely pushed forward week after week discovering new and exciting ways to embrace the art of storytelling despite her perceived shortcomings. The bright-eyed teacher journeyed throughout the Wide-Webbed World looking for answers to her questions, gathering resources into her tool belt, and completing many quests. She had many adventures; moments filled with failure, mediocrity, trial and error, collaboration, and triumph. Then one day, as the young teacher was about to take on another complex quest, she looked into her tool belt in search of the right tool for the job and realized the syllabus was no longer there. In fact, she couldn't remember the last time she had looked at it. What once was her only tool for survival and guidance was now replaced with hundreds of other tools - better tools - that she had found on her own and had learned to use all by herself.
So far...
...my journey into and through the world of digital storytelling has been an incredible expedition of reflection and self-discovery. I have achieved proficiency in so many different types of digital tools. Prior to this course, I had had exposure to a variety of resources for incorporating technology into my classroom, but this course has challenged me to look beyond what I already knew. Once upon a time, digital storytelling was not something that I thought had a place within the realm of a math class. With limited time to teach my standards and integrate the tech I was already using, I figured that storytelling was best left to the English classroom. After engaging in the stories of others and creating some of my own, I realize that storytelling has been in my math classes all along. As a result I've been providing more intention behind how I use storytelling in my class. Another aspect to my journey has been the methods through which I have been learning. Learning in isolation has never been my way, and previous online classes provided me with few opportunities to learn with others. After learning to set up my blog and create posts, I realized that there was so much to learn from my peers in their own blogs. I spent hours scouring the stories and posts of my peers learning how to find engaging resources, how best to critique stories, and gathering feedback about my own blog. My greatest aha moment came from the day that I learned that my writing was gathering followers who would comment on my posts and ask me questions of their own. Learning that I was a valuable resource to them just as much as they were to me was a huge boost in my confidence. In order to examine my learning even further, allow me to showcase some of my favorite creations and blog posts that helped me elevate my learning to the next level.
1) Nick Grimes: "Creating a World of Empathy Through Virtual Reality"
To be completely honest, the only reason that I ever wandered into Nickolette's blog was because her nickname, Nick Grimes, sounded an awful lot like the name of one of my favorite fictional characters from the zombie genre, Rick Grimes. The only reason that I stayed was because of her writing style and her careful selection of stories and articles. I realized right away that they key to maintaining a good blog - one where people wanted to come back week after week for updates - was to write in a way that was interesting yet felt personal to the reader. Nick consistently did this through the use of tone in her writing. Her story and article selections were also extremely engaging, and I learned that this was the second key in being able to maintain readership. Ever since these realizations, I have strived to incorporate both of these traits into my own blog.
The first post that I ever read from Nick was her article on virtual reality headsets and their ability to change the world for the better. This was when I realized that digital storytelling was not just a PowerPoint presentation, an animation, or a movie. It is instead a new form of literacy that makes the reader become involved in every aspect of the story being told. Virtual reality is one way to access this deeper connection with stories and the telling of them and through this connection begin to empathize with peoples and situations from other cultures and environments. For the first time, I understood that virtual reality - when used as a storytelling device - has the power to erase stereotypes, bring understanding to different cultural beliefs and ideals, and begin to bond humanity as one.
2) Andrew Polson: "My Favorite Thing? Rocking Out!"
I am a visual artist and have been my entire life. Creating has always been a dominant word in my vocabulary and it oftentimes even dictates the ways in which I teach math to middle schoolers. On the other hand, performance art is not my strong suit, and I will avoid it at all costs if I can. However, a big part of storytelling is about one's own voice and the author's presence throughout the story. It's what separates an okay story from a truly great one. As a result I have learned to challenge myself in many ways to start to bring myself back into my creations. It was a process that had to be worked up to, and I worked hard to put my own image and voice into my Daily Creates. Again, though, I avoided filming myself directly due to my discomfort as a performer. Then along came Andrew's Daily Create. The first time that I saw his video, I grinned from ear to ear and kept thinking how brave he was for not just improvising on his guitar on camera, but actually dressing up like a rockstar and jamming out hardcore for all to see. He wasn't afraid to be himself or afraid of looking silly on camera, and this made his story all the more fun to watch as a result. Taking his lead, I then created my own video of myself doing what I do best - lipsyncing. Remembering that Andrew's video was not just about playing guitar, but also about acting the part, I did my own acting throughout my video to match the tone of the song I chose. To an outsider, the majority of my learning looked like learning video editing software, but on the inside the majority of my learning was about learning to be comfortable telling my own stories through my own image and voice. Andrew inspired me to do that.
3) Lisa Fish: "The Gift of Failure"
Writing digital story critiques every week was and still is one of my favorite activities. Oftentimes I find myself procrastinating other work in the real-world to do my virtual-world critiques. Once I started having confidence in my abilities to select interesting stories, I began wondering how well I was doing with analyzing the work effectively. Reading back through my critiques, I realized that all of my critiques were focused only on the positive aspects of the stories I was choosing due to the fact that I really felt that the professional pieces I had selected had really taken into account a lot of aspects of storytelling. While it is not a bad thing to talk about the positives of someone's work, it is also not the most effective in providing feedback that someone can use to improve their work. Quickly, I began searching through my peer's blog posts to figure out who was already writing with more detail and critical reviews. Enter, Lisa Fish. The first time that I laid eyes on one of her critiques, I was given the chance to finally see how to be critical and constructive with feedback of digital stories. What really blew my mind was how she eloquently described her reasons for why the story worked and her reasons for why they didn't work as well. In this critique, she was left with many questions for the storyteller and rather than brush them off, she brought them to the front of the critique. She wasn't afraid to ask the hard questions and bring light to how to improve upon the story further. Taking her lead on this critique, I slowly learned how to start considering the positives and negatives of the stories I selected and including all aspects into my critiques. At this point in my critiques, I was also searching for good ways to present my feedback. Lisa's work felt very familiar to me as the structure of her writing is very similar to mine in that she likes to introduce the article with a summary and a highlight of major plot points to set the scene for her critique. She then presents her critique as a formatted table (much like a rubric) in which she provides context and feedback for the piece. I adopted her use of the table in my own blogs due to the fact that it feels like the rubrics that I give my own students in class and it has a very user friendly format in which to understand the feedback provided. I also really enjoyed her numerical grade as well as her written feedback, and I learned how to start doing that in my own critiques.
4) Louiza Kondilis: "Digital Storytelling for Struggling Writers"
At the school that I teach, I am the only middle school math teacher. I am responsible for teaching five different preps of mathematics which requires me to tailor my instruction to both the high-flyers, the remedial students, and everybody else in between. Time has always been against me in being able to get through my curriculum in quality and timely manner, especially working at a project-based school. Over the last few years of my career as an expeditionary teacher, I have discovered that projects, expeditions, and adventures are not the time consumers that I once thought them to be. Rather, instead, they are time creators. Many learning targets and goals can be taught under the umbrella of a single project. Not only are they a time creator, but they are also a fantastic avenue to engage struggling learners and advanced learners alike. While reading through Louiza's chosen article about struggling writers, I was reminded of this fact again. What I really appreciated about her review of this article was not just the reminder that projects like digital storytelling reach multiple modalities and boost confidence in struggling writers and readers, but that she also cited evidence of its effectiveness and ways to differentiate for those multiple learning styles in a single classroom. The hardest part in getting other teachers (who are not expeditionary) to see how effective projects like digital storytelling really are for boosting students' abilities in math and English is getting past the idea that there isn't enough time to do things like this. I loved that her response to this article really highlighted those areas that provided support and understanding for how to bring digital storytelling into any classroom despite time restraints and skill levels. It was a breath of fresh air to the normal responses that merely state that digital storytelling is great as opposed to why it is great.
5) Kendra Wilt: "6 Second Art!"
I like complexity and depth. The way I teach math is through an ocean a mile wide and mile deep filled to the brim with equations, numbers, symbols, and words. The way I make art is also complex and deep; 1,000 brushstrokes on one small canvas, 1,00,000 tiny strings woven into the complicated patterns of a sculpture. The way I write stories is much the same. I am a lenghty writer. I find joy in writing words - lots and lots of words. I rarely feel satisfied with a single paragraph or two. Many of my favorite stories have been pages long or many minutes long filled with incredible amounts of imagery, and this has been my inspiration for the length of my own stories, digital or written. But then one day, I was perusing the Twitter feed for DS106 and found a daily create from Kendra Wilt that intrigued me. The title, "6 Second Art!" was what initially got me to click on the work. I am a sucker for anything art, but the idea that a piece of art could only be 6 seconds really got me interested. Clicking on the link took me to a Vine that began immediately and within just a few seconds ended just as quick as it had begun. I have always had issues with using Vine, because of its short length and my unwillingness to try creating short videos, but this little story captivated me in ways I never thought a Vine could. I watched it over and over again, laughing harder every time I watched it. It was so short, but so much fun to watch the little guy get surprisingly "CHOMPED" by the huge dinosaur. After a while, I started to realize that though this story's length was very small, its level of detail was still enough that it could captivate an audience just as well as a big story. Through this Daily Create, Kendra really challenged my thinking about the length of digital storytelling in that a story can still be told in enough detail to be considered a good story no matter how long or short it is.
6) Matthew Kubiak: "The Fallen of World War II"
At one point in my excursion to find quality stories to critique, I came across a road block. Each week I would challenge myself to find a new type of zombie story or a story that used a unique form of media presentation. After a while, though, I began to run out of stories that stood out on their own. After struggling for some time to peruse the net for out of the box zombie stories, I again looked to my peers for guidance. At that time, Matthew Kubiak's latest blog was centered on a story that I had seen many times before detailing the numerical losses of World War II. When I had seen this story a year before, I instantly fell in love with it for a variety of reasons; the first reason being that it was centered around math, the second being that it was a compelling story, and lastly that it was an interactive audience experience not just a film to watch. At last, some light bulbs switched on in my head! Here was an example of a story that reached out beyond the boundaries of its media tool to bring the viewer in as a part of the story. To get a better understanding of the numbers, the viewer needed to click, drag, and alter the mechanisms of the video to see these relationships clearer. Previously, I hadn't considered hybridized digital stories, but after I began searching purposefully for these types of stories I began to find a whole new world of zombie fiction to critique. In this way, I became challenged by Matthew to find my own interactive media stories that were more than just video or game, but a bit of both.
Where am I going from here?
My learning journey has come so far in understanding what makes a powerful and well told story that I think the next step in my learning is to finally develop my own story of significant length and complexity. I have really enjoyed all of the small steps of creating with the Daily Creates and the creative writing pieces, but I feel that now I want to take on a larger project that uses two or three different kinds of technology to produce. Along with this, I want to start learning some new software and tools for creating digital stories. I have only been exposed to typical video editing software, and I would like to know more about applications that allow me to include more than just video elements in my story. I also want to learn more about gathering followers/readership and how to continue my blog for a larger audience after this class has finished. With a full-time teaching load I don't often get time to myself to just create, and my blog has helped me to find my creative roots again. I want to learn to find time to keep creating in this way.
The end...
...for now...
*Artwork created by Anders_Dahlstrom from Storybird*
Credits:
Anders_Dahlstrom