Digital Storytelling SawHorse

I'm getting ready to help teach a senior English composition course the process of digital storytelling, along with master teacher Matt Formato, of Downers Grove North High School. Today, we showed them a series of stories created by students from the past several years to give them a feel for the kinds of things you can do with the medium and to set the bar for expectations. Tomorrow, we'll begin the process of demonstrating the software we use (Pinnacle Studio 9 Plus), along with having a discussion of intellectual property rights and the application of Creative Commons licensing. Within this process, we'll also demonstrate Flickr and Freeplaymusic.com as sources of imagery and music, respectively, where students can legally obtain the resources required to begin composing their digital story. Finally, we'll show them Digitalstories.org, a repository for digital storytelling movies, where hopefully many will upload their stories to share with a global audience, and in the process, demonstrate that they too have a voice, and a competitive one at that.

To support this process, I'm in the process of building a digital storytelling platform for the kids (I'm tempted to call it a digital storytelling saw horse) using Blackboard. Within Blackboard, I simply create a new class, and enroll the kids in the class manually, so when the kids login to Blackboard, they will now see another class in addition to their class schedule. Other classes can also be enrolled as necessary.

You can access the class as a guest to see how Blackboard works, and how we can use the tool to support learning.