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In terms of my writing practice, digital storytelling is familiar, but backward. When writing I spend all of my time translating from image and sensation to the written word. Because of the insistence that we use the audio track as the "storyboard" outline, we start with the written word and then try to find the appropriate images to create a sensation. Sorry, but this is just too weird for my creativity to wrap its "head" around. So now I've envisioned and re-envisioned to try to meet what I can do with the images and technology available, and I'm just muddled and disappointed. In terms of what is familiar to my teaching practice, everything…pretty much. But then I don't think even good teaching practice is always in harmony with what I wish as a teacher. (For instance, my quandary above.) I often feel my "teaching practice" is actually a detriment to my students' own discoveries. Describe your current teaching situation, as well as the rubric(s) you might implement for digital storytelling projects. I'm trained as an English and Biology teacher but have spent the last six years teaching study skills and supervising study hall, so it's impossible to say what my next "situation" might be. In the school where I work, there are no Macs. In fact, I've only worked in one secondary school ever that had Macs along with PCs, and that was a combined high school/middle school situation. In terms of the other available media for digital storytelling, the school I work at now has XP, so MovieMaker is the tool of choice. Many schools are limited to older technology that can't handle XP, so the standard at this time is PowerPoint. (A sad state of affairs, in my opinion, as students learn little more than "PowerPoint speak" when using this media and don't really push the envelope to actually do anything narrative.) In terms of using digital storytelling in any future classroom I might have, I would like to very much. First, the timeline for completion would have to be longer than our workshops. One of the key lessons you learn as a teacher is that "Stuff Happens…Often and Repeatedly." Second, I think working in groups would be challenging, but probably necessary at least until students have some practice. I think this lends itself to the same rubric as most writing, but with a twist – content, organization, and design being the big three. Awareness of audience and the presence of "voice" would also be critical to me. Writing teachers need to learn a thing or two from art and film teachers in discussing design and composition before launching into digital storytelling. What are your thoughts about audience and voice? As I said earlier, voice and audience are very important, as they determine where we draw lines and how we tell our stories. In the digital medium, voice can be quite literal, or atmospheric. And audience, because of the medium, can be greatly enlarged to include almost anyone on the web or who has a DVD player. This is both really exciting and a little scary. The legal/privacy issues can put a quick end to the "extended" audience idea; but even then, the chance for students to develop their own voice, an ownership of ideas and stories they have told, is just as important. That and the idea that they can "speak" in the language of their own dreams, the movies and media of our culture today, makes this project even more important for teachers to advocate for in their schools. Describe your project and your workshop experience. To sum up the actual "writing" process…this was an incredibly frustrating experience due to the gap between my vision and what I actually managed to create. Starting with having to work from the Mac environment after being told we could use MovieMaker (and spending all my spare time since March playing with my PC and using it for every technology workshop all summer long), my attitude was perhaps not the best; but my lack of faith in all things Mac was not challenged at all during this workshop. The technology let me down at every turn, saving and not saving on a whim…crashing out, forgetting how to import or export…having to hit the same "button" as many as a dozen times before anything at all happened…having entire timelines scrambled just because I put the program on the dash long enough to import another photo. I must have closed and reopened the OS six times just to get CDs in and out of the drive. In the end I discover the project I "saved" to DVD and the project hard drive is actually the version that occurs just after I imported the song track under the rest of the project and before the hour and a half I spent getting all the sound levels adjusted so you can hear the spoken part. This after I had "saved" it at least five times during the process of adjusting said levels. I only discovered this when I went to save my project file to a flash drive (immediately after closing iDVD), and it said it was in the trash…and then wouldn't recover it from the trash. I can't recover it…(and I thought HP was the only computer manufacturer who hates its customers). I chose this subject matter because it put my "writing" together with family storytelling…It's been two years since my grandmother died (only months after my grandfather), and this is the first I've been able to "say" anything about them. I will have to find some other way to "say" something about them now…this ended up just far too flawed and restricting in terms of expression for me…due to technical difficulties, missing photos, and the limited time available. But perhaps my unhappiness about all this is due to the fact that in writing, and my own artwork and photography, I'm practiced and have some hope of creating something that conveys meaning and is also "attractive" in terms of keeping an audience's attention. I can't do that here, not yet. And that's where I have some hope…I think this is an incredible tool to use with students. I just fear I don't have enough expertise to help them through the process when it falls apart like it did for me. Guess it's a good thing they're already better at this than I ever will be! Anyway, I'll keep trying.
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