Digital Storytelling

To start off todays blog, we are diving into the world of digital storytelling, something I have personally never heard of or explored as a student. Digital storytelling is just like it sounds, in the school setting a student would create a digital story to create an online based story, on whatever topic the teacher assigns. So naturally, in wanting to be a physical education teacher I think to myself, how does this apply to me? How will my students benefit from digital storytelling in a PE setting? I find it is always good to have questions because that furthers learning and pushes me to find new ways to do something, adapt or modify it to fit within a PE setting. The two topics I chose to read about I thought would be a good introduction to me as to what digital storytelling is and give me a good starting point on how to incorporate it into my own physical education class at the elementary school level.

The first topic I picked to dive into was titled, “How Digital Storytelling Improves Learning”, it can be read and found at http://30hands.com/blog/how-digital-storytelling-improves-learning/ . This blog written by Eric Braun taught me first how to create a story digitally and what steps to take and what content to put in one. I could totally use something like this in a PE setting by having either a individual or small groups work together to create a story about their favorite activity they engaged in over the course of the year. This would be done for grades 3-5 since I see them twice a week at 50 minutes each time. Toward the end of the year, a lot of instruction has been covered and many sports and skills have been learned, so the students should have a lot of information to pull from when creating their digital story. I learned from Braun that digital storytelling has a narrator who narrates the story over the storyboard and I think having students present in this form over their online based work instead of presenting in front of others is a direction technology is leading presenting. I also took away that digital storytelling makes the student or students be more knowledgeable about their content because they have to take different approaches on how they present their work, through visual thinking, communicating and presenting and it allows them to be more creative in how they tell their story. Allowing students to create a story about their favorite activity we did throughout the year will show me as the teacher how the students understood the material, what lessons I made interesting and how creative the students can be in how they interpreted the material by narrating their story, adding color, pictures, videos and words. The most important key that I have taken away from this blog is that when I want my students to do a project or create something on paper, change it up and have them do something different like digital storytelling, it can be done in a PE class on a PE topic!

The second topic I picked to dive into was titled, “Six Elements of Good Digital Storytelling”, it can be found at http://creativeeducator.tech4learning.com/v04/articles/Take_Six, this article is written by Bernajean Porter. Here I am going to break down the six elements how I understand them and how I would use them in the project I would have my students do that I stated above. Living inside your own story, when presented the story has to be convincing and the peers listening to the digital story narrated by the student or students has to keep the interest of the audience and make it a story that is enticing and fun to follow along. This could be hard in a group setting because each member of the group will have a different experience with their favorite activity, but they can break each of their favorite activity down and tell their own descriptive story. Unfolding lessons learned, as a teacher watching the presentation I can gain an understanding of how the students interpreted the activity through their storytelling, if they made a type of connection to it and how it had and will influence their everyday health. Developing creative tension, this one is tough for the project I had in mind, creating a story that has an intriguing situation and then is later solved at the end where the audience is engaged in the story and makes it memorable. The only thing that I can think of on how this aspect could be used in the story of a students favorite activity would be coming up with a new alternative way to do a skill that the other students don’t understand until the end of the story where it all comes together. This intrigues the audience, engaging them throughout the story and then explaining how they would execute the skill at the end. Economizing the story told, getting right to the point and doing it quickly with enough detail to do so. This can easily be done in any type of storytelling and some students will be quick and get straight to the point when telling their stories and others will take a little bit longer. I will give my students a time frame that I would like their stories to be within, with the hopes that they get to the point of what activity and why the activity they picked was their favorite or the most interesting. Showing not telling, music, sound and pictures can be used to help tell a story instead of using words. I absolutely love this idea because in PE, a lot of music, sound and pictures are used throughout instruction, so the students should be used it and incorporate it into their stories. This is probably a requirement I would have when creating a story about their favorite activity because I want it to be colorful and have fun music to keep the audience engaged, most importantly I want the students to be able to tell their story the way they want to and be creative while doing it. The last element is developing craftsmanship, goes along with what I just stated above. The digital story should be expressed through pictures, music, narration, bright colors and special effects. Of course these are all things the students will have to learn in previous classes like their own classroom teacher if this is something they do, otherwise I will have to spend some time to show my students how to do it. Unless I find an easy tutorial on YouTube that they can follow to create their own. In third grade and this being the first time they are doing this for me in PE, I would not expect as much as for when they are in fifth grade and have done it a few times in my class.

Now that I am in the beginning stages of learning what digital storytelling is, it is something I will future educate myself on so that it is something I can use in my future as a physical education teacher. I learn something new every time I click a new week in class and for that I am thankful to be gaining tools for my future.

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." - Ralph Waldo Emerson