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!

Summing Up

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?

1. 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. 
2. 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!