One journey has ended and another begins.   As our “Digital Storytelling” road trip winds up this week, we student travelers will transition from knowledge acquirers to knowledge imparters.

What have I learned that I can pass along?

1. Digital storytelling is a much bigger “thing” than I knew. There are photo stories, textual stories, video stories, and stories that are a combination of all of these; there are linear stories and nonlinear stories; there are interactive stories and static stories.
2. There are many AWESOME tools out there to tell stories with.   What Web 2.0?   Some of these are Web 5.0!   I really enjoyed learning about Sway and Adobe Spark.   These were my favorite.
3. Something I know about myself as a teacher is that I am not a very good listener.   I grew up in a household with teacher-parents.   My dad’s structured teacher-directed classroom had a big influence on me.   For the past couple of years I have been trying to learn to be a better listener/questioner.   Kendell is a good questioner; she asks the right questions and I am aware of training myself to do the same. (The funny thing is, I have never really liked answering those deep questions.   They make me uncomfortable and I have to work so hard to come up with the answers.   However, I know that after being asked those questions is when I have done the most learning.   It’s a skill, honestly.)
4. Finally, I learned to let something sit for a minute.   I like to finish something and check off the box, but I learned that sometimes something needs to sit.   I need to resist the impulse to press send, but instead reread, question, rewrite, and repeat.   It was a growing experience for me, and I really like the end result.

How can I pass along what I have learned?

Now I know how to encourage my writing students to think outside of the box for delivering required content.   As a matter of fact, I did that today.   In my 10th-grade College Prep Composition class, we are reading  Night  and also writing personal narratives.   I was in the process of cutting them loose to work independently and suggesting they start their outlines when I thought of Evernote’s short story planning template.   So, I showed them the storyboard I made up for my foot selfie story.   Then, I showed them my foot selfie story.   Then, someone asked if they could use Spark…

Why Not?!

I just had to think it over for a minute.   “Okay, sure.   Absolutely.   Here’s how we’ll do it…”   Now there’s some personalized, adaptive, interactive, differentiated (insert jargon-y educationally hip word here) learning.   I can totally see offering different “paths to learning” by using some of the tools I learned with this course.    Honestly, I wish I could use social media – like Slack. That would be cool too.

I am pleased that I took this course and I think I knew I would enjoy it.   I really did put a lot of effort into the work I created and spent quite a few hours on those projects.   However, I love the end results and I get to keep them!   Not only to I get to keep my stories, but I get to keep the knowledge I gained through the opening of my mind to new possibilities in storytelling.

PS… Thanks for the opportunity to write something “low-key.”   It is fun to have permission to be informal.