Article Review Multimedia Project

    The article I chose for this assignment was entitled. "A Guide to Producing Digital Storytellers". For a tech newb like me, this provided some helpful hints for teaching students about digital storytelling and also offered great ideas that I can use for professional development. The article begins by giving 5 key reasons teachers should encourage students to become digital storytellers and concludes with 5 suggestions for educating digital storytellers.

    As  a Literature teacher, I really liked the fact that critical thinking was at the top of the list of reasons for becoming a digital storyteller. Technology is wonderful and vitally important, but many times it trumps the student's analytic and interpretative skills, or those skills are sacrificed for the sake of technology implementation. Digital stories can also have an impact that reaches beyond the walls of our schools. Because they are easily accessible, parents, friends, and people from all over the world have the opportunity to view a student's multimedia creation if they choose to publish it. Working online also helps students become savvy digital citizens and gives them the opportunities to discriminate between appropriate and inappropriate websites and images. By continually updating and creating stories, students can develop a digital portfolio that they can use to demonstrate proficiency for teachers, promote themselves for any type of job, and get their voice and opinions out to society.

    In the second half of this article, the author gives advice about educating young digital storytellers. Since technology is always changing and becoming sophisticated, the author suggests that teachers should focus on the content instead of the digital apps and platforms. Probably the best advice I gleaned from this article was the inclusion of the SAMR (substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition) model which depicts different levels of technology implementation. By looking at each stage of SAMR, teachers can accurately measure how effectively students are using the digital tools and the level of sophistication within the digital world to create their stories. It's also imperative that teachers create expectations and explain outcomes in advance so the students have a very clear picture how the projects will be evaluated (a rubric would be a great example for clarifying expectations. Evaluating early and often provides feedback that enables students to progress through different phases. Using different methods of evaluating also helps students grow as digital storytellers and expands their horizons. Finally, like any good educator, the author encourages teachers to begin teaching basic fundamental digital skills and progressing to more advanced techniques and platforms as the students become more proficient. This helps build confidence and prevents the technology from overwhelming students