6/15/08, Digital Story Telling

Digital story telling seems like another great activity to use in a writer's workshop, and helps children take on the student-author role. Although it is something that would take some time and practice, I believe it would interest so many different types of learners, even those who sometimes are not interested in writing. One thing I think would take a lot of time though, even if students have been doing writer's workshop activities throughout the school year, would be to teach the idea of editing, or being economic. If the digital story is a personal one, I could imagine some students would have a hard time paring down the information to only the details most relevant to the story. After all, everyone likes to talk about themselves- and young children usually love to show pictures of themselves!

I enjoyed the articles we read on digital story telling because they clearly laid out what the authors' believed was the best way to have students do the projects. The step-by-step process mentioned, from preproduction through post production, seemed to make sense and was something that would work in most classrooms. I also liked that it had the students creating story boards, something that also helped me the most when I did stories for my high school news show. I still need to make a final decision on what I will make my digital story about, but am looking forward to the process and getting more practice in iMovie.