Digital Composition Teaching Tips

Seven Ideas: Two Assumptions
1. Storytelling is an age-old way of transferring knowledge—instructional, persuasive, historical, or reflective.
2. Digital storytelling involves combining narrative with digital content to create a short movie.
3. The resources available to incorporate into a digital story are virtually limitless, giving the storyteller enormous creative latitude.
4. However, no media is good for everything; each has costs and benefits in terms of what skills each develops.
5. Reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking.
6 The relationship between word and image is becoming increasingly unstable, and the nexus of control is the way in which text gathers around the image and supervises its reading (See Jay David Bolter).
7. Students spending much more time with visual media, their critical thinking skills suffer, yet their visual intelligence is actually rising.
   
Two Assumptions
   
Assumption Number One
  "As students spend more time with visual media and less time with print, evaluation methods that include visual media will give a better picture of what they actually know."
--Patricia Greenfield, UCLA distinguished professor of psychology and director of the Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles.
   
Assumption Number Two
   
  Make sure your course design focuses on critical thinking, collaboration and revision and includes a balanced diet of media in order to develop visual intelligence and social intelligence.
   
   

 

Recommendations: (with a tip of the hat to Clifford Lee)
1. Scaffold the writing process in clearly defined, separate pieces, with the ultimate goal of creating the text, image, sound and voiceover narrative.
2. Include an authentic demonstration of their work in some type of exhibition, so that students are motivated to complete the project for mastery, rather than completion – AND it gives the students a sense of purpose for their writing.
3. Scaffold EVERY aspect of the digital story project:
• Show models of strong storytelling techniques and analyze those together.
• Do a workshop with the incorporation of the "right" type of music that serves to complement your story.
• Play student-made and adult-made digital stories as models to critically analyze and evaluate prior to their assembly.
• Have students go through peer-edits in the writing AND reading of their voiceover narrative.
4. Push students to be more meta-cognitive about their inclusion of visual and audio clips, making sure that the visual does dominate the text; emphasize and model critical thinking skills at every step in the process.
5. Teach students the importance of word choice, and when to use the image or sound to carry the narrative argument, through workshops and models, to emphasize how to make an important point with fewer words.
6. Create a community of learners who are comfortable with collaboration and socializing the process of composing and revising.
7, Understand that assessment is going to be complex and rewarding.