Today's media specialist has limitless possibilities at her fingertips when it comes to developing digital stories and helping teachers and students develop their own digital stories. These electronic modes of sharing information are quickly gaining popularity in education. They allow you to combine audio, video, still images, personal narration, text, and anything else to make one "story." They can be created in just about any movie making software, so free software can easily be used for this. Students could make digital stories to teach their peers about concepts they've learned in class. Teachers can create these to make history come alive for their students. Students can do research projects about any topic of their choice and present their information in the form of a digital story. They are excellent to use for assignments because it allows students alternatives to the traditional pencil and paper report. Students who may struggle with written expression may be able to create excellent digital stories to show their learning. How can the media specialist help students and teachers begin using this wonderful resource? She can start by making one of her own to show as an example of possibilities. She can help students and teachers who are crunched for time locate resources that are in the public domain so copyright laws will not be broken. She can teach entire classes how to conduct internet research and can create professional learning modules for teachers to access on their own time to help them learn how to use them in the classroom. Digital stories are excellent ways to combine different modes of information and will continue to gain in popularity because of their ease of use and cost effectiveness.
eBooks also contain many possibillities in the classroom. They are full-text, electronic versions of traditional books. My elementary school does not own any eBooks that can be "checked out." However, we do subscribe to World Book Online, which contains many eBooks. These books are often viewed as a web page, so it does not take up memory on the computer to download the text. There is not a limit to how many students can access these books at one time, so an entire class can look at a section of text in the computer lab. This resource will provide audio for some of the texts, but not all of them. This is especially helpful for slower readers. E-readers (iPad, Kindle, etc.) provide many possibilities in the media center. Students could read them just like traditional books, but at the current costs of these items, I do not believe media centers would be spending their money wisely on these items.
You made some good points as to ways the media specialist can help teachers and students develop digital stories. Due to the time involved and copyright issues, it would be helpful for the media specialist and teachers to collaborate on ideas and resources. Not only would it speed up the process, but the media specialist would have sample projects on hand to show other teachers that might be interested in doing digital stories in their classes. We are planning interdisciplinary units at my school. Digital storytelling could be used to illustrate problem solving in math or science, to tell the story of a particular culture in social studies, or writing in language arts. With the medial specialist working in conjunction with all the subject area teachers, students will be able to connect information from different subject area content into a story.
ReplyDeleteStudents are spending more time on the computer as new technology is developed and less time reading printed books. Reading books on the computer provide a means of promoting reading. In addtion to your comments, ebooks are available to students of all ages; they offer a broad selection of titles and interests. They include many different features that allow children to look and listen to stories. Ebooks allow students to read books about current issues and events, and can be delivered almost instantly. We don’t have ebooks in any format at my school, but hope to have access to some in the near future.