Digital Story Telling Sites & Samples

Have you heard of Digital Storytelling?  This is a fun project-based learning or constructivist learning approach to 21st century biography in and out of the classroom.  The University of Houston has an interesting perspective on the educational uses of digital storytelling if you are looking for more information on this interesting topic, including great samples on a variety of topics.

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While I do not have a classroom at the moment (though I love the idea of creating collaborative digital stories in a high school setting, this idea is so adaptable, especially for cross-curricular lessons), I have been using the concepts of digital storytelling while working with my college student staff to incorporate educational technology into their peer tutoring practice.  In particular, we have been playing with the idea of using digital stories to create more engaging independent trainings through simulated virtual scenarios.  Let me tell you, starting this process has lead down one serious rabbit hole!  There are SO many resources on the web to create online visual and auditory stories.

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A few very helpful lists of online resources to create digital stories can be found here and here.  Working with two of my Lead Tutors (those who have done advanced certification and training work and themselves conduct portions of tutor trainings), we are in the process of developing a protocol, samples and "rubric" for tutors to complete.  We are asking them to use a digital media of their choice to create a virtual, simulated experience that will help them demonstrate comprehension of training concepts related to "Assertiveness" and "Working with Difficult Students," two required training topics for them this semester.  We have had a lot of fun working on the concepts together and are starting to weave the pieces together nicely. 

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Because I have amazing student staff members who are excited about new learning modalities, they were eager to get started on this project!  Here are a few of the samples produced through  Go!Animate and Yodio.  Other options were to use iMovie, Prezi, Slideshare, etc. I apologize for not including the embedded videos but my Blogger account wasn't happy today :)  I also started down the path of creating a Wiki to house ALL of the training materials required under our certifying authority... you know, I sometimes think being an educator would be a LOT easier if I wasn't such a perfectionist type-A.  Starting to put a few pieces of training material online is turning into wanting to put the entire years-worth of training materials online.  If you're going to do something, you might as well do it right, you know?!

I would love to hear your thoughts on the above two samples.  Once more of my staff complete their own digital simulations and our wiki has a bit more of a life to it, I will be sure to share the content here. 

Have you thought of using or are you already using digital storytelling for more collaborative learning in your classroom?

Prezi in the Hizzouse

For my current position as an academic support service coordinator at a large public university, I have to give a lot of presentations.  I mean, a LOT of presentations.  To students, to parents, to other staff members.  I absolutely love it.  But they don't say its the #1 fear of all human beings for nothing.  None of us want to get up there and bore or lose our audience.  Have you ever inherited or been given a PowerPoint to present that was created by your predecessors and thought, "Good Gravy, how am I going to make THIS interesting"?  Well if you haven't met Prezi yet, allow me to introduce you to the answer to that there question.

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Prezi is a newish multimedia platform that will help you create more dynamic, engaging presentations and lessons.  The best part is that it is web-based for easy collaboration, at-home-grading, and allows for great accessibility without fear of losing your thumb drive or forgetting your email password.  Educators also are allowed a special bonus super awesome status that grants us extra bonusey things within Prezi... so there's that.

Yes, inheriting documents, presentations and curriculum can be painful if you are a perfectionist, type-A, OCD, formatting nazi, control-freak... but that wouldn't describe any teachers that I know out there.  Spending hours adding in animations and sound effects to your PowerPoint is simple smoke and mirrors my friends.  What you need is an engaging visual medium to actively draw in your audience and Prezi does this nicely.  Even Ted Talks experts use Prezi.

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Word to the wise:  Exercise caution when first working in this media though, you may actually get motion sick if you get a little carried away with the movements.  Also allow yourself some time to get over your rote PowerPoint techniques, Prezi takes a little getting used to and a lot of pre-planning in order to be effective.

As I mentioned, inheriting digital products can be a bit of a nightmare.  One of my pet projects in my current position has been to make the online resources available to our many college students more interactive and engaging.  Because I work in academic support, its my personal opinion that these support services should meet our students where they are physically and intellectually and to provide robust learning experiences for them.  I am fortunate to work at a very cutting edge university wherein products to allow for these kinds of robust experiences are readily available.  In order to share with you both an example of my use of Prezi for educational purposes as well as my roadmap for moving my department into the 21st century (from PDF read-only docs to online educational games!) I am including one of my presentations for your viewership here.  Some of it may make absolutely no sense to a university outsider but I hope it will provide you with a bit of insight into the Power of Prezi.

The Year of the MOOC

Give me an M, Give me an O, Give me an O, Give me a C... Let's Go Communists and Cheats!  I'm pretty sure many think those would be appropriate cheers for OSU: Open Source University, the newest kid on the block in higher education in 2012.

Did I just piss you off?  Before you rant ~ I'm completely kidding about the Communist part, though I'm sure many out there feel exactly that way about open source learning products and platforms.  Learning?  For Free?  For the MASSES???  From textbooks to full courses, free online educational resources are popping up on the inter-webs left and right and people have some OPINIONS about this, your truly included. 

There are REAL, amazing experiments currently happening in bringing education to the masses through the internet.  But in years, these new online learning platforms could change the face of higher education, something that entire communities and economies of our country are built upon.  As with many new creations, a rush to produce can sometimes lead to calamity.  While providing college level material by college professors for free to the world is undoubtedly a great thing (as great as Khan Academy is, its just a dude with a camera... who made him an Art History, Economics and Thermodynamics expert?), I still wonder, is regulation where we need it to be with these new platforms? 

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I am filled with both amazement and trepidation that many schools around the world are joining the tide of online open source Higher Education.  Paulo Friere would be so proud.  But might we be rushing it?

In September of this year, The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) released an article about Stanford University's new online Open Source University Platform called Class2Go.  Currently, Stanford is offering two new MOOCS for fall term 2012 through Class2Go in computer science/technology based disciplines, which is along the lines of many other MOOCS out there.

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Alphabet soup making you hungry?  Familiarize yourself with this term.  MOOCS stands for massive open online courses. Stanford's Class2Go might be a great example of how to proceed in the experimentation phase we currently find ourselves in, as it is a collaboration between multiple constituents and has the capacity to be adapted and altered by outside users such as other universities.   This is not Stanford's first foray into MOOCS as they have used Coursera and other platforms to approach this new educational product and market in the past.

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I know you might be thinking, none of this is new... I remember when MIT and Harvard released OpenCourseWare and EdX way back when.  But the main difference in modern MOOCS is that they are not just written copy or content anymore.  MOOCS are actual courses in that they are attempting to assess comprehension and mastery and in some cases, create a space for multimedia learning and dialog.

Sounds pretty nifty, doesn't it? So far, completion of most of these online courses doesn't grant participants college credit.  But that can't be too far off.  Because this is a burgeoning field, there is nothing but research, opinions and commentary on all of this experimentation.  Perhaps this is an over generalization but it seems the majority of proponents of MOOCS are non-academics while those in the ivory towers are a bit on edge.  This makes a lot of sense if you think about the fear of their field falling out from under them.  Nonetheless, this is a fast growing area of higher ed that will be both exciting and nerve-wracking to watch from the inside.

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Curious to read more? The CHE offers a fairly comprehensive walk down the exploding path of Open Source University politics and platforms here. 

What do you think are the pros and the potential cons of expanding Open Source U?

Who's That Girl

Working in higher education for the past 5 years has been a very different and unique experience to my prior experience working in k-12 education (for 3 years).  This might seem fairly obvious, but one of the larger ways it differs is in relation to the public portion of my identity as an educator.  I find myself much more comfortable growing and sustaining an online personality and network as I work in higher education than I ever did in k-12, and in fact I find it vital to my professional growth, unlike during my experience as a high school teacher. 

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As part of an educational technology course I am taking, we were required to create an About Me section of our blogs or a social networking site that we would actually use.  I was nervous to begin this section of the course as I have always tried to keep my professional and personal online identities very separate, as I think is the case with most educators.  I also had no experience with Google+ and was a little overwhelmed by my inability to keep most of my profile incognito (I couldn't, for example, use just my last name).  However, in order to support this week’s NETS-T standard (this week's for me was: Standard 5d is to “contribute to the effectiveness, vitality, and self-renewal of the teaching profession”) and my own professional growth, I am finding it important to embrace a position of vulnerability, realizing that others will be judgmental always but hoping that the positives will outweigh the negatives of sharing my educational opinions online.

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 For class this week we read “The Future of Reputation; Gossip, Rumor and Privacy on the Internet” and a section that particularly resonated with me was the following, “Reputation is a core component of our identity – it reflects who we are and shapes how we interact with others – yet it is not solely our own creation . . . Our reputation depends upon how other people judge and evaluate us, and this puts us at the mercy of others.” (Solove, 2007, p. 33).  Taking into consideration that I have the ability to shape the content that others will be able to judge me on (here and on my About Me page), I am choosing to embrace this challenge of living in the internet public.  I considered just creating a LinkedIn account, and might still, but for the ease of linking everything through Google I went with them.

On my About Me page of my new Google+ profile I wrote that “I really believe in the power of education to transform lives and I believe it is our collective responsibility to ensure everyone has access to this power. One of the myriad of ways I participate in that notion is to write an educational blog focused on policy reform, literacy, ed tech, and higher education called A Memory of Words (after a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote).”  By writing that out and sharing it with others, I think it will hold me accountable to the notion that I have a larger purpose for sharing my thoughts on this blog.  I'm not just writing for a grade in this course or for the sake of listening to my own opinion but because I think it matters that we actively pursue positive change for education in this country.  If I can bear that in mind, I think I will find more comfort in my new online network. 

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Have you found balance in your personal and professional online networks?  Have you thrown in the towel and just consolidated both?  Does it matter?

Referenced:
Solove, D. (2007). The future of reputation. New Haven: Yale University Press.