Technology Finally Catches Up

[Tom Banaszewski]

When I was defending my thesis on how to effectively integrate digital storytelling in a school setting (Download TBanaszewski_DS_thesis.pdf), I proposed the idea that it would be really beneficial to have an easy way for students to post a draft of their stories and receive feedback from teachers, students, seasoned digital storytellers, trained storytellers, and other digital storytelling facilitators. That was just three years ago. Several social networks have quickly entered the online community field and I'm just catching up on the differences between Facebook and Ning to name just a few.

Ning appears to provide a very useful tool for all those interested in using a writers workshop model when assigning multimedia assignments to students. Too often, we as teachers assume that students already have the media and visual design skills that are critical to effectively communicate with digital media.

I'd like to test out posting a video or podcast to the main page of my Ning network and using that in class to discuss the elements of it that made it effective or what could have been improved to get the point across better. I'd assign students to post a draft of their podcast or digital story or even Powerpoint and seek advice on how to improve it. You could attach a rubric that students use to score it. I'd avoid the Rating feature that's part of Ning video viewing.

I have access to a variety of teachers, professional storytellers, digital media producers, and digital storytelling facilitators. It'd be cool to put together a project where all of these people are part of the Ning network and working together to help students "effectively communicate" with multimedia.

While Ning does a great job of making it easy to post video and audio, the Forums area could be used to help students with the script writing of their project. They could post a draft before doing anything related to recording or finding images. This is the most important stage of any multimedia project. The more time spent helping a student hammer out what exactly they're trying to say, the better results you can expect in their attempts to successfully "dance text, images and audio on the screen" (Bernajean Porter).