Digital Storytelling: Reflections (Week of 28 September)

I have been using digital storytelling since coming to ISB. As a language teacher (previously in the ES and now in the MS) it offers excellent opportunities for students to put vocabulary and language structures to use in realistic and creative ways. Students can demonstrate mastery and, even more importantly, to extend their use of language in new and creative ways. As a teacher, I can create many opportunities for language use, but a truly open-ended activity (such as digital story-telling) allows students to combine language in truly original ways. This is the heart of language development.

In my Humanities class, digital storytelling offers similar opportunities for language development. With many English language learners in the classroom, this type of project provides a different kind of challenge for students learning to express their ideas. For all students, a digital story about an artifact or about looting is a different but valuable opportunity to build on one of our core Grade 6 skills - the support of an argument with evidence.

The precision of language necessary to both be convincing and entertaining is essential for all students and transfers well to written work. Though digital storytelling does not replace academic writing, there is great value in linking ideas and images. It shows a students interpretations of the connections between concepts in a multiplicity of ways.