Knock Knock. Get the Door, It's Digital Storytelling.

Digital Storytelling is something that I've always found very interesting and fun. By using film-based technology, students create a project about the things they learned. Naturally, it has become quite popular in the information era, and there are PILES of examples of multimedia on the internet. My current favorite at the moment is History of Japan.

As you may have guessed, the video is about the history of Japan. It's a very informative video which covered a surprisingly good amount of knowledge. But this doesn't only show off his knowledge of the text. It shows he knows  how to create vocal recordings, create musical recordings, and incorporate graphic design and light instrumentals to help enhance his message. Digital Storytelling helped him not only know the information, but helped him master multimedia software.

While I do find it very entertaining and fun, Digital Storytelling can take forever to do, especially because not all students have prior knowledge with the software. It's a long process, and it's not always going to help to know how to use things like Audacity in their later lives. I don't think that I would try and actively teach it in class, because it's a lot of time that could be spent teaching other things, like:

All jokes aside, there's a lot of thing an educator has to do. While I do think that Digital Storytelling would be fun, I also think that there's a lot of things that would make it too difficult with the time constraints. Maybe if it was a class project it could work, but it could easily take 1-2 classes setting up the presentation, 2-3 days creating the project, and 1-2 showing off the finished product. Best case scenario that is 4 days, worst case is 7, which may be the norm on the first run through. Admittedly, I probably will flirt with the idea because I think it's a lot of fun and can help people interact with things other then just the books. I really liked using Storybird. It's a really great software that is very easy to use. I just feel there's a lot more we could do with our time as educators.