IT 5340: What is Digital Storytelling?

The Center for Digital Storytelling states: “Many individuals and communities have used the term “digital storytelling” to describe a wide variety of new media production practices. What best describes our approach is its emphasis on personal voice and facilitative teaching methods. Many of the stories made in our workshops are directly connected to the images collected in life’s journey. But our primary concern is encouraging thoughtful and emotionally direct writing.”

Jason Ohler states: “Digital Storytelling uses personal digital technology to combine a number of media into a coherant narrative.”

Wikipedia states: “Digital Storytelling refers to using new digital tools to help ordinary people to tell their own real-life stories.”

For this class, our working definition is: A first person narrative told in the writer’s spoken voice. It is a combined with a variety of media including images, audio, and sometimes video to convey an instructional objective as part of a larger instructional unit.

IT 5340: The Essential Question

It’s important to consider the “essential question” when developing an instructional unit. This was news to me when we were asked to come up with our essential question and the unit questions for an instructional unit.

An essential question centers on a philosophical, moral, or thought provoking theme.

The unit questions address learning outcomes and training benchmarks by asking students to analyze and contemplate the implications and reasons behind the content on the learning outcomes.

For more information, check out these resources:

• http://www.research.ibm.com/knowsoc/index.html
• http://cbae.nmsu.edu/~dboje/strategic.html
• http://www97.intel.com/en/ProjectDesign/UnitPlanIndex/GradeIndex/

 

IT 5340: Imaginative Education

I listened to a video about Imaginative Education that is located on the Imaginative Education Resource Group website: www.ierg.net. The video is titled “IERG Ideas Discussed on TV”. Dr. Kieren Egan is the main speaker.

The Imaginative Education Resource Group is a group of researchers, teachers, graduate students, parents, and others who would like to make education more effective.

Here are the notes I took while listening:

Main Question

·         What skills and experiences do students need from their academic education?

·         How can school be a meaningful experience?

Typically: Determine the objectives I want to meet, the course content, and then the methods. This is more like building a refrigerator.

Imaginative Education: Start with the emotional aspect and significance of the topic. When our emotions are engaged, our imaginations are engaged.

What We Can Do Better

·         We need to provide informative and relevant lessons.

·         We need to consider how to make the content personally meaningful and emotionally engaging and exciting. What role does what we are teaching play in the students’ lives?

·         Education needs to be a discovery process that allows the imagination to take place.

Ideas That We Can Implement

·         Narrative

·         Storytelling

·         Mental imagery (Create characters out of inanimate objects.)

Psychological Theory

·         Constructivism and Vygotsky

·         Cognitive learning