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!
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!
