An Introduction

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!