Question: How can students' use of digital multimedia enhance their personal narratives?
Imagine you are new to teaching English: Surrounding you are students with various interests that are not interested in writing research papers and stories. Jenny, your highest-achieving student who maintains a food blog, looks bored. Johnny, who during his spare time talks about his love of movies created by Stanley Kubrick, is asleep at the desk. How can you ever manage to get them interested in writing their "Slice of Life" projects for your Personal Narrative unit?
Previously, teachers would apply a variety of means to attract students' attentions when preparing for assignments like these. Behavioralists may recommend rewarding students with extra credit if they pay attention. Others may recommend being forceful with them, penalizing students who don't manage to take notes as you introduce the assignment. However, I think there's a better way. Let's look at each of the students again:
In spite of her performance in your class, even Jenny looks disinterested. Is there a way you might incorporate her hobby (blogging) into the assignment to appeal to her interests?
Recalling Johnny's interests in film as noted by his love of Stanley Kubrick movies, maybe adapting this assignment to a video might pique his personal interests.
Like it or not, while we should still encourage students to write traditionally, there are more effective means to write personal narratives which can best appeal to students of various interests using digital tools. For students who are interested movies, for instance, creating digital stories with movie-making tools like Apple's iMovie can be effective in incorporating students' personal narratives with audiovisual materials. For wannabe bloggers, we can defy the way many classrooms traditionally use blogging by allowing children to create narratives using the full capabilities of the blogging platform - combining the written word with audiovisual materials of their choice. However, why should a teacher incorporate utilizing multimedia in personal narratives outside of just incorporating students' outside interests? Are there any other benefits to telling personal narratives utilizing digital multimedia?
When looking at the Utah State Core Writing Standard 3, there are many means by which utilizing digital multimedia for personal narratives could benefit students. For example:
Visual media can engage the reader in setting out problems, situations, or observations the student may want to write about.
Audiovisual media can easily be used to portray dialogue and multiple plot lines with added details traditional written texts may struggle with (i.e., emotion).
Various multimedia sources can be combined to build a coherent whole.
Sensory language can easily be portrayed in visual media. An addition of a narrator can also convincingly add sensory details.
However, how can one know for sure of the effectiveness of digital multimedia in personal narratives? That's the purpose of this blog: Focusing on two genres which can utilize these sources for personal narratives (Blogs and Digital Storytelling), I will show through examples of these genres alongside research of these genres through sources like the National Writing Project the potential of these multimedia genres in enhancing personal narratives in the classroom.
Do you have any personal examples of how utilizing digital multimedia enhanced students' personal narratives in the classroom? Are there genres which I may have missed which you would like me to talk about on this blog? Feel free to write these down in the comments section below!
Wait... you're writing a blog post about blogging? You know what that means....!
Alright, in all seriousness though, when looking at how a typical blog is used in the classroom, its clear that teachers use only a smidgen of the resources students can use to communicate their personal insights through narratives. For instance, let's just look back at the beginning of the post: when noting that I'm writing about blogging while writing in my blog, it's clear that I wanted to make a reference to the film Inception. If I had tried to make this reference through word alone, there are two ways I could reference this film:
I could make a long-winded analogy of how my blogging about blogging is similar to the plot of the film. While this would be the most effective when communicating to people who haven't seen the film, this would bog down my writing and would seem tangential to the main purpose of my blog.
I could have been lazy and just write "(Inception horn)," hoping that my audience would be able to catch my reference. While this would be easy for someone who watched the film, if a reader of the blog hasn't seen the film, they have no way to envision what I might be talking about.
Clearly neither of these methods are that great, so thanks to the versatility of the blogging platform, rather than doing either of these, I instead decided to include a YouTube video with the horn's sound, clearly cuing to the audience about the film about I'm trying to reference without actually mention it.
However, while tools like these are readily available for any new blogger to use, when teachers typically use a classroom blog, many are either entirely text-based wikis used for students to discuss what they're learning or as a bulletin board for assignments. So, rather than fully utilizing this digital media format for a medium for students to write personal narratives, they look like these:
Wiki
Bulletin Board
Now don't get me wrong, there are many good reasons to adapt the blogging format to these purposes. While wikis digitize conversations in the classroom throughout the day, bulletin boards are useful in helping the students keep track of assignments while also providing them with the rare form of multimedia needed to push the content along. However, there's more that blogging can do.
When looking at Lesile David Burns and Stergios G.. Botzakis's article "Using The Joy Luck Club to Teach Core Standards and 21st Century Literacies," one commonly underlooked use for blogs are to help "students generate personal narratives based on text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections." While wikis can be great for students to practice metacognitive skills as they take what they might be reading in class to develop simple narratives focused on their interactions with the text, it might be scraping the bottom of the barrel in regards to what blogs could be used for. Why? In my personal opinion, one reason for this is because this misses entirely the potential blogs have for crafting effective personal narratives. Sure, while there are plenty of blogs on the internet which use no digital multimedia at all, there a lot of narrative blogs incorporate multimedia sources to one extent or another. By teaching blogging in this way in the classroom, it not only opens up the opportunity for students to craft the "multimedia essays using images, audio, and text" that Burns and Botzakis talk about later in their article, but this also teaches a narrative form that is filled with potential in the 21st century.
But how does one approach blogging as a multimedia essay? Fortunately, when looking at the National Writer's Project digital literacies site "Digital Is," there are teachers which can provide some insight from transforming blogs from text-based assignments to creative outlets for students to communicate their stories. One prevalent figure in this movement is Bud Hunt, the author of the blog entry "Teaching Blogging Not Blogs." When defining what a blog is as early back as 2005, he described it as thus:
"Student blogging [is] a playground for working with new ideas... The more I work with and discover about blogs, the more I realize that they are an entirely new way of thinking... A student blogger could be a podcaster, an artist, a political scientist, a technophile, a poet, a chemist or whatever. The blog is the management, not the content.”
Thus, rather than simply considering blogging an activity students may do to write "in the 21st century," a blog is actually a versatile tool which can be adapted by students for whatever purpose they see fit. For some, it could serve as a diary - something to disclose personal events to a small, private audience. For others, it could be a wordless art exhibit, providing to the world a myriad of different art pieces for the whole world to see. It literally is a tool that the student could use for anything...
Splendid.If a blog can be whatever the student wants it to be, how can I as the teacher instruct students how to use it as a tool to combine written narratives with multimedia sources to enhance ones' writing?
Don't despair. Fortunately, while compiling a series of his own blog posts which helps one understand the basics of blogging, not only does Hunt include a list of types of postings a blog typically has, but specifically for the question this blog is tackling, he also discusses framing ideas and the routines of blogging which relate directly to the question of my first post:
Framing Ideas
When looking at some of his ideas on how to connect blogging to outside sources, there are many elements which can be helped using multimedia sources:
1. Blogs can connect to locations. According to Hunt, "When we write, we might write about specific places, people or events. Often, those events or places have websites. A very basic form of connective writing, then, would include creating links to those places." While hyperlinking to websites can suffice in connecting blog writing to places, people, or events, you don't need to have students simply settle for outside links when, with multimedia sources, you can give the reader a hint of what they find in the blog itself. For instance, let's say you are a history teacher who wants students to write a fictionalized narrative on Pearl Harbor by someone who witnessed the event. If a student wanted to talk about the attack on Pearl Harbor, would the reader be drawn simply by looking at a link about the event, or a picture of the event like this:
2. Blogs can connect to yourself. Say you want to have students write a personal narrative about an earlier time in their childhood. While you can do what Hunt suggests and "quote yourself" as you reflect on an earlier moment of you life, one other thing you can do to help the reader connect with you even more is connect this story to an audiovisual material of that time. Take my brother for instance: while he is currently happily married serving as a worship pastor at his local church in Pennsylvania, once upon a time he looked like this:
He's the Guy with the Mohawk....
Are you now curious to learn about his life's story? If so, thank the photo of his high school self for that one!
Routines of Blogging
In another one of the blogs he shared in the article, Hunt also stressed some purposes for why people blog in the first place. While some of the reasons he posts can be encompassed with the framing ideas listed above, there are two particular routines he mentions that I feel are needed to be included:
Blogging as sharing. While admittedly this can be done way more efficiently through micro-blogging platforms like Facebook and Twitter, for students who simply want to share something intriguing while writing their narratives (whether it be a song they liked, a meme which seems appropriate for the story, etc), blogs are probably one of the better mediums available to share these.
Blogging as experimenting. While the majority of the blog ideas I've mentioned particularly apply to individuals who want to simply incorporate multimedia sources in traditional narratives, this is not the only means by which one could tell a narrative using digital multimedia in a blog post. Take Keven Ho Chi Hang's post on Medium "Transforming Medium Into a Photo Narrative Blog." While he does write about his struggles in creating the blog and brief descriptions of the locations in Europe and America he visited, the majority of the narrative is told through photos and the brief captions underneath those photos. While this could be simply considered an over-glorified photo album, his arrangement and his brief writings in between the photos tell the story of his experiences he had while vacationing.
Connecting to Standards So, from what we know about blogging, how does blogging as a narrative fulfill Utah Core Standards?
When looking at Writing Standard 3d, blogging uses not only words and phrases, but also audiovisual materials as a mean to paint a "vivid picture of the experiences, events, setting, and/or characters" being discussed by the author. As Bud Hunt notes in his article, blogs can be used as a tool to connect narratives to locations and yourself. How much easier can you do this than by being able to post images and videos about these topics in your blog post? Clearly blogging using digital media can craft the "multimedia essays using images, audio, and text" that Leslie Burns and Stergios Botzakis mention in their article about teaching 21st Century Narratives.
When looking at Writing Standard 3c, because Bud Hunt describes blogging as an experimental genre, this can allow students to experiment with various techniques to allow the digital media and narrative text to "build on one another to create a coherent whole." As long as the text and multimedia work together and are relevant to one another, they can tell a story far more effectively than simply text alone.
The Aftermath: Why can Narrative Blogs be helpful to Students?
While there may be many reasons why Narrative Blogs - with the infinite amount of multimedia potential one can include in them - can be helpful as an assignment for students, perhaps the most important reasons why teachers shouldn't overlook this genre of writing is because of the potential this genre has in creating the writers of the 21st century. According to student William Bass in his English Journal article "Living Authors are All Around Us":
"Through the use of blogs and other publishing tools, teachers around the country can bring the larger world into the classroom. No longer are students just writing for their teachers; their ideas and stones are available to a much wider audience. Not only do many students write for the love of language, in some classrooms they are expected to approach their work as real authors, writing for audiences far beyond the classroom. Papers that were once reviewed by peers and graded by teachers are now published online and, in many cases, read by people from other schools, communities, and even countries. There is no doubt in my mind that they are real authors. The medium may not be traditional, but they are authors nonetheless."
To close, I want to leave one personal note: when trying to find research on this topic through the teaching community and websites including the NCTE and the National Writing Project, I found it perplexing how missing this topic was in much of my research. Sure, because my topic is on the impact of digital multimedia in personal narratives, I found plenty an article on Digital Storytelling (a topic I will discuss in my next post), but when it came to blogging... not much. With all this being said, teachers: please don't discount the impact of blogs in the classroom. While it may not be as multimedia-driven as digital stories, it still is quite versatile in what one can do to write narratives - and blogs such as "The Nerdy Teacher" show that many know this. Likewise, when it comes to writing, this can help students easily get their voices heard not only in the class, but to the world. Easily students from far reaches of the Earth can share their experiences with others, and they might even develop a passion for blogging that extends far after your time with them is gone. Clearly blogging is a genre that is going to be significant in the coming years to come...
Do you have any additional insights on how digital media can enhance students' blog post assignments? Have any anecdotes in trying to implement strategies like these in your classroom? Do you feel that there is something I missed? Whatever it is, please comment in the section below!
To introduce this next approach to write personal narratives using digital media, allow me to provide you with another situation:
You are currently a new English teacher teaching in a High School in Central Phoenix. When you are planning your personal narrative unit, you want to give students the opportunity to write using digital media through blogging, but you encounter one dilemma: in each of your classes, there are at least one or two students who recently immigrated to America from the Southern border and most of them have very little experience with the English language. While fortunately your school has a good ELL program to teach them English, you still are ready to create an alternative assignment to accommodate to their needs. But is that really necessary? While I do recognize that there are many times where a teacher needs to create alternative assessments to cater to students with limited English experience or special needs, the one beauty about creating personal narratives with digital media is that you don't necessarily need to have the narrative be text-heavy. In fact, in some digital narrative strategies, words play second place to multimedia as both work together to tell a story. This strategy is what scholars like to call "Digital Storytelling." Now what is digital storytelling? According to Sara Kajder, Glen Bull, and Susan Albaugh in their 2005 article “Constructing Digital Stories”: Digital stories consist of “a series of still images combined with a narrated soundtrack to tell a story.” Now how can images and narration work together to tell a story? Rather than telling you, here's an example:
As you can see from this example, while there is clearly a personal narrative that Nadine wanted to share about how her asthma motivated her into pursuing art, rather than simply writing her story about it for people to read, she instead used her art alongside an appropriate soundtrack to build connections between what she is trying to say and how she presents it. Through combining these elements into one cohesive whole, it allows the story to "amplify [the] writer’s voice" - making it easy for us to see what she is trying to say.
While that's good and dandy, Eric, how can I teach my students to do this in an English class?
Fair question! When consulting Kajder, Bull, and Albaugh's article, they actually manage to provide an easy 4-step process on how to create these. While I won't go over these in depth (I recommend you, after signing up for "Academia," to click here to learn more), I will summarize the steps:
Scripting: When starting working on your digital story, write exactly what you want to say preferably on note cards or at least a 1-page double-spaced sheet of paper. While a one-page script might seem kinda sparse, keep in mind that the images should communicate any sensory details that might not be necessary in your script. (PS: This also provides a challenge to your more-verbose students to exercise their skills in writing concisely!)
Storyboard: After writing your script, sketch out the pictures and videos you might want to include in your story. Keep in mind that a typical 2-minute digital story uses around 12 pictures and make sure to include captions so that you can easily know what part of the script goes where when rehearsing your lines.
Also teachers, if you feel that some kids may feel uncomfortable trying to draw out their storyboards during this section of the project, there are online sources such as StoryboardThat which make it easy for students to sketch out their screenplays and much more! (This is a fun resource for students who also want to provide visual depictions of books you may read during the semester. For examples of these, click here!)
Revision: During this section, don't just simply ask students to merely revise their scripts for grammatical accuracy, but also make sure that students discuss how the pictures help contribute to their understanding of the story. Keep in mind that while the pictures you may include in the story shouldn't spell out the story, they should relate to the story and its narrator
Also, when looking at Sara Kajder's article "Enter Here: Personal Narrative and Storytelling," you may want to have students do the following activities while revising:
Highlighting: Have students marked up their scripts, highlighting all of the action in green and all of the reflection in pink. Too much pink indicated too much preaching. Too much green indicated that the writer was telling an anecdote with no implications.
Timeline: Have students rearrange the order of events in the story, making them either more or less chronological.
Exploding Sentences: There were two possible plans of attack here. First, have writers work to explode the sentence into a slow-motion retelling. Or, have writers think of the explosion as more of a magnifying glass, focusing on pinpointed, targeted specifics.
Tips for Creating the Video: While there are many pieces of advice Kajder, Bull, and Albaugh provide when creating the video itself, here are some of the following which stuck out the most to me:
If photos aren’t scaled properly, make sure to either include photos with a high-enough resolution in the process of creating, or use tools like Photoshop to adapt these images. The last thing you want in your digital story is a bunch of pixels!
Use effects only when necessary.
When recording your script, make sure you record the lines in individual files rather than the script as a whole. This will make it easier as you catch any stuttering or poorly paced lines in the video.
Seems pretty simple, eh?
Alright, now since you know the basics on how to create a Digital Story, why might you do this over a traditional narrative or even a blog? Especially when noting that some might not consider this - with its small writing applications and reliance on images - a very rigorous approach to narrative writing, why might you consider doing this over something else? When looking back to "Enter Here: Personal Narrative and Digital Storytelling," there are a few reasons for this:
1. While this method might not teach students traditional literacy skills, it is actually very effective in teaching students literacy skills relevant to the 21st Century. According to Kajder, "Literacy requires knowing how and when to use 'the most powerful cultural tools available for making, communicating, and enacting . . . meaning' (Wilhelm, Baker, and Dube xviii). Today, that includes online technologies, communication technologies and tools... and software tools that allow us to visualize thinking and represent it in multiple ways.” Thus, by teaching students how to write a convincing narrative using images pulled from websites like Google or video production tools like Apple's iMovie, we are teaching students literacy skills that are needed to interact in a 21st century society.
2. In regards to the complaint that this assignment might not be "rigorous" enough for the classroom, Anne Hass Dyson in her article "Transforming Transfer: Unruly Children, Contrary Texts, and the Persistence of the Pedagogical Order" states, “[C]hildren must . . . link new material . . . to old material, with its familiar frames of relationships and purposes; without such linkages, they cannot approach the new with any sense of agency, with any sense at all.” As silly or artistic this activity may seem at first, digital storytelling is by no means unrigorous. Much like what Dyson states, a key point in mastering the ability to tell stories through this medium is the ability to link images with words - allowing what is seen and what is heard to work as one to tell a story that is deeply meaningful to the author.
3. Finally, as indicated in the beginning of the post, because this method of storytelling requires students to use images and words together to tell a cohesive story, it may lower the learning curve for students who may be disenfranchised by traditional writing assignments alone. Because of this, ELL students who may have a hard time communicating English will not only find the assignment easier since it requires less writing than a traditional narrative, but they may be able to combine their words with images of their lives to create stories which are sincere to the students and show their actual literacy skills - not merely the skills reflected by their status as English Language Learners. In fact, the National Writing Project posted a video about this entitled Literacy, ELL, and Digital Storytelling: 21st-Century Skills in Action which discusses more about this. In this video, one can see how personal narrative writing using digital storytelling can motivate even struggling writers to want to share their stories with the community:
Connecting to Standards So, if this is such a good method to have students write narratives with online resources, what standards could be fulfilled using digital storytelling?
Much like with blogging, digital storytelling fulfills Utah Writing Standard 3a in regards to the fact that, through using audio and visual materials alongside your script, it allows the reader to be engaged in understanding your "problem, situation, or observation" without being bogged down by lines of text.
In regards to standard 3c, if scripted and storyboarded correctly, digital stories can easily allow the the multimedia work alongside the script to create a cohesive story which builds throughout.
Also like blogging, digital storytelling fulfills standard 3d in the sense that the multimedia a student chooses to include in their story can "amplify [their] voice" to allow details and sensory language to be communicated much more easily than through text alone.
If storyboarded in the same manner as listed in "Enter Here: Personal Narrative and Storytelling," a chronological approach to storytelling will make it a lot easier for the author to conclude with a reflection on what the author "experienced, observed, or resolved over the course of the narrative" as mentioned in standard 3e. This can be clearly seen in Nadine's digital story where, having detailed her changing desires from sports to art, she is able to reflect on the blessing which was her asthma.
Conclusion In the end, while digital storytelling is a newer medium of personal narrative one can employ in the classroom, it is one which can be used to help students create stories which the reader can understand through both sight and vision. If done correctly, the scripts the students create can combine with the images they select to create one cohesive, powerful story. On top of this, though, it is a medium which also is much easier to approach than traditional written methods of narration: for students who are ELLs, for instance, these narratives don't require as much writing yet can still create a story to show their overall literacy skills in the class. Overall, this is a method that, while newer in nature, can be an effective tool in the teacher's toolbox to create simple, yet powerful, narratives that are more accessible to the class as a whole. Do you have any experiences of using digital storytelling in the classroom that you would like to share? Are you a student who has written a digital story and want to provide more insight on how one can create one? Whatever it is, please feel free to provide your comments and questions in the comment section below. I would also like to give a special shout-out to Mr. Wright on the Language Arts Schoology page for his suggestion of StoryboardThat for getting students to create storyboards easily on the World Wide Web! If you haven't already, please sign up for an account on Schoology and make sure to follow the Language Arts page for any questions or suggestions you would like to share with other English teachers across the Nation! Also, if you want any additional information in the sources I cited in this post, feel free to view these resources below! English Language Arts Grade 9-10. Salt Lake City: Utah State Office of Education, 2013. Print.
Kajder, Sara, Glen Bull, and Susan Albaugh. "Constructing Digital Stories." Learning & Leading with Technology 32.5 (2005): 40-42. Web.
Kajder, Sara B. "Enter Here: Personal Narrative and Digital Storytelling." The English Journal 93.3 (2004): 64-68. Web.
So, let's revisit the question I posited back at the beginning of this blog: How can students' use of digital multimedia enhance their personal narratives?
When looking at blogging, one thing that is clear is that, while blogging can be a powerful tool in creating traditional personal narratives with hyperlinks and audiovisual materials, it seems to be very much underused among teachers today. Because blogging, according to Bud Hunt, is a management tool and not a form of content, its use in telling a personal narrative can include pictures which establish the setting, home videos which allow the reader to connect with the student's past, and so on. Since its also a more experimental genre, the form in which this narrative can take shape can vary from simply providing the reader multimedia sources so the author won't have to waste text describing it to even telling stories primarily through photography - using text only when needed to connect each photo together much like the Medium blog "Transforming Medium Into a Photo Narrative Blog." In spite of this being a genre which allows students to use digital multimedia to enhance their narratives, many teachers today currently utilize this form merely as either a comment board (in regards to class wikis) or as a bulletin board where the teacher posts assignments and relevant multimedia sources to the class.
When looking at Digital Storytelling, the best way I could put it is that it takes the photo narrative blog as seen in the first post and ups the ante by transforming this to a video where the narrative and media sources work hand-in-hand to tell a narrative. Here, while some narrative writing will take place during the scripting process, the amount which students have to write is minimized to allow the multimedia to play a larger role in storytelling than previously before. Because of this, while digital stories may prove to be easier for students (such as ELLs) who may have a harder time with the English language, it can also be challenging for more skilled writers as they are forced to narrate their stories in as concise of a fashion as possible. Likewise, as they select the multimedia they choose to include in the story, not only can they use storyboarding to develop an idea of what images they can include to enhance their scripts, but they then are forced to determine which images, music, and even transitions will best enhance their scripts to turn the two sides of the story into a cohesive project. In these regards, I find it not surprising why there are myriads of sites and articles from groups like the National Writers Project and the NCTE which discuss this format of digital writing - while its rigor may not manifest itself through the writing process, it makes up for this by teaching students how to master linking images and words to tell a story with more impact than a traditional writing project would ever do.
In concluding this, I do recognize that there are a lot more forms of digital writing I can use in answering the overall question of this blog. If you have any requests for me to cover one of these other genres, suggest them in the comments section below. Also, of these two genres, which do you think better uses digital media to create a personal narrative? Is there anything I missed in my analyses of these genres which you would like to include? Please let me know!
