May 2008 — 21st-Century Classroom
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Show and Tell
TIES has created a three-day digital storytelling academy that it offers for 15 to 20 teachers twice per school year. The classes address writing, editing, and storyboarding, with much hands-on learning aided by the use of tools such as Adobe Photoshop; Apple's iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand; and Audacity for editing audio.
THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE debuted ScreenNation this spring. The program will provide a high-quality forum for students in grades 7 to 12 to post and share their films. The ScreenNation site will offer student filmmaking challenges that match up with teacher lesson plans, professional tips, and feedback.
TIES teaches the storytelling processes and concepts developed by Bernajean Porter, author of DigiTales: The Art of Telling Digital Stories. Porter's website was an outgrowth of the book and is a guide for educators on how to make the best use of digital storytelling in classroom instruction. She says that learning to use digital technology to tell stories can be transforming for students who would otherwise tune out education: "It is really hard to share the engagement, nourishing of inner spirits, and energy that emerges with kids who have detached from school."
Penny Pease, technology integration coordinator for Minnesota's Orono Public School District 278, was among a quartet of educators from her district who attended the TIES academy during the 2006-2007 school year and learned about Porter's digital storytelling concepts. Last spring, Pease worked with a fifth-grade teacher in the district to add a digital storytelling component to a writing assignment that the teacher gave to her advanced language arts class after the students returned from a four-day environmental camp. The "turning-point moment" writing activity had each student write about a meaningful moment or activity from his or her camp experience.
"Once the story was perfected-it involved several drafts to get it just right-we moved to telling the story digitally," Pease says.
