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!
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!
