2nd October 2015,
Dear Colleagues,
I hope this email serves you well and everyone is set for the weekend. The teaching and learning email this week is thanks to Jane who found a very interesting article on digital storytelling and has been able to secure access to Binumi which will give us an opportunity to create our own digital stories. More on both explained below.
Digital Storytelling: What it is… And… What it is NOT Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano; Globally Connected Learning
http://langwitches.org/blog/2015/08/18/digital-storytelling-what-it-is-and-what-it-is-not/
I was lucky to have shared my childhood bedroom for a few years with my grandmother, when she had come to live with us after an illness. At bedtime, she would tell me stories of her parents and three brothers and growing up in East Prussia, fleeing to the West after WW2 and the things that occupied her mind. I was hooked on storytelling. The fascination grew when technology became available and opened up possibilities that were just not possible before. I would give anything to have been able to record my grandmother’s stories and have shared them with my own children years later.
Humans are natural storytellers. It has been THE FORM of passing on knowledge from generation to generation. Storytelling existed in some shape or form in all civilizations across time. In the 21st century, which we have the luck to live in, Digital Storytelling, has opened up new horizons, inconceivable without the use of technology. Storytelling is evolving, as humans are adapting, experimenting and innovating with the use of ever changing technology, the growth of human networks and our ability to imagine new paths.
Maybe as part of a natural process, we tend to stick first to the familiar and “substitute” our task (see Ruben Puentedura’s SAMR model). Substitution is not enough to explore and experience the potential of digital storytelling.
Over the years, I have seen in classrooms and created myself many stories that are:
merely substitutions to what I could/have done/told in analog ways
created in isolation, without any connections to a larger concept, idea or community
created only to be read by a teacher for a grade, without the possibilities of ever reaching a larger audience for feedback or being able to take its place as a puzzle piece of a larger picture/story
Digital Storytelling is NOT about the Tools, but about the Skills
Digital storytelling is not about how to use VoiceThread or iMovie. It is not about the ability to create an MP3 recording and adding it to an XML file, so people can subscribe to our podcast channel. Digital storytelling is about different types of skills we are developing in the process, such as:
writing, speaking, communication skills
oral fluency
information literacy
visual literacy
media literacy
language skills
auditory skills
drama Skills
presentation skills
listening skills
publishing skills
Examples:
Using a blog to tell learning journey/story over time. (use categories or archive to show growth over time)6 Word Memoirs
Google LitTrips
Flat Stanley Podcast
Visualize Poetry Around the World
Digital Storytelling is NOT about creating media, but about creating meaning
Smartphones and other mobile devices have made the ease of filming, recording or taking images easy, available anytime & anywhere as well as relatively economical compared to earlier times. The amount of media that is being created and uploaded per minute is exponentially growing and mind blowing. Although there is value in contributing your perspective to a larger pool, the emphasis of the stories we share through different media is about creating meaning and about making that meaning visible to others, not about the act of creating the media itself.
Examples:Christopher Columbus creates 21st Century Explorers
Listening, Comprehension Podcast
Digital Storytelling is NOT only about telling a story, it is about contributing and collaborating…
Digital storytelling is not only about telling the story, but tapping into the potential of being a contributing perspective, example, unique experience to a much larger story. The question grows from “How can I tell my story?” to “How does my story fit in and add value to the stories of others?” How do we create a much larger story comprised of individual stories?
Examples:Sherlock Holmes and the Internet of Things (Thank you to Alan Levine for the project link)
“Sherlock Holmes & the Internet of Things is an ongoing prototype developed and run by the Columbia University Digital Storytelling Lab that explores new forms and functions of story. Designed to be an open R&D space that experiments with shifts in authorship and ownership of stories, the massive collaboration also uses a detective narrative to examine the policy and ethical issues surrounding the Internet of Things. The goal of Sherlock Holmes & the Internet of Things is to build a massive connected crime scene consisting of smart storytelling objects.”
Twitter Storytelling
Learning how to create “Snippet Stories”,use simultaneous narrators and fractured storyline, co-telling by using #hashtags, sharing with your network and adding value to other people’s learning
Collaborative Storybook: Florida Explorers
Digital Storytelling is NOT about telling an isolated story... it is about sharing & connecting experiences and perspectives to a community
It is a powerful realization that we all have something valuable to share with others. Digital storytelling takes that isolated story, living in our thoughts, potentially shared with people we know or meet face to face and connects it with a much larger community.
Examples:7Billion Others In 2003, after The Earth seen from the Sky, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, with Sybille d’Orgeval and Baptiste Rouget-Luchaire, launched the 7 billion Others project. 6,000 interviews were filmed in 84 countries by about twenty directors who went in search of the Others. From a Brazilian fisherman to a Chinese shopkeeper, from a German performer to an Afghan farmer, all answered the same questions about their fears, dreams, ordeals, hopes: What have you learnt from your parents? What do you want to pass on to your children? What difficult circumstances have you been through? What does love mean to you?
Looking For Stories (Thank you to Alan Levine for the project link)
“Looking for Stories” is an online documentary web serie where Joan Planas (filmmaker) document stories from people and places around the world using video, photography and articles. We don’t judge the stories. We show them respectfully just as they are, trying to gain a better understanding of the world we live in.Digital Storytelling is NOT only about the transfer of knowledge... it is about the amplification…
While the transfer of knowledge has always been a primary reason for storytelling, the importance of the amplification, the reach of our voices is what makes digital storytelling transformational.
Through social media, our potential connections, collaboration and dissemination paths can reach exponential levels. The reach of our voices is about the amount of people our stories are capable of touching. We have moved from an audience of one or a few in a face to face environment to a global audience through synchronous and asynchronous tools.
Even young children (with the help of parents or teachers) can find their voice and be heard! Traditional limitations of age, physical handicaps, financial limitations preventing traveling or a lack of social network connections in the physical world, don’t have to limit someone’s voice any longer.
Examples:
Kristallnacht- Night of the Broken Glass: By taking a story written down by my grandfather:
translating it into English
adding a visual dimension with images
an auditory layer by adding my voice and music
publishing it to a digital platform and
strategically sharing it publicly, I was able to amplify my grandfather’s story/experience and voice past his lifetime. #DigitalStorytelling is NOT about substituting analog stories... it is about transforming stories
Taking an analog story, which is written in text form on a physical piece of paper, told with printed visual material or with a voice to someone sitting in the same room as the storyteller and digitizing it with the help of tech tools does not take advantage of the full potential of digital storytelling. If we are truly looking to transform what stories are and can be in the digital world, we need to look beyond recording a story from a piece of paper or animating our photos from a field trip into a music video. We could dip into the world of transmedia storytelling and look how audience participation, seamless movement between different media can propel a story forward, engage the audience on multiple layers and change the storytelling process altogether.
Examples:Inanimate Alice (Transmedia Storytelling)
Inanimate Alice is an interactive multimodal fiction, a born-digital novel relating the experiences of Alice and her imaginary digital friend, Brad. The series is written and directed by Kate Pullinger and developed by digital artists Chris Joseph and Andrew Campbell from an original idea by series producer Ian Harper. Episode 1 was released in late 2005. There have been five consecutive episodes created to date with a sixth in production, from a planned story arc embracing a total of 10 episodes spanning Alice’s life from age 8 through to her mid-twenties. The viewer experiences a combination of text, sound and imagery and interacts with the story at key points.
Digital storytelling is NOT just a story told/created/published on a digital platform.
What is Binumi? https://www.binumi.com/
Binumi is an innovative video platform, which allows its users to create videos of amazing diversity and to tell their stories instantly through cutting edge visual imagery. Founded by Anthony Copping, a former National Geographic documentary filmmaker and avid traveller, Binumi has over a million videos and special effects clips, and more than 7,000 audio tracks – all royalty-free.
Binumi.com is the largest educational video creation platform in the world and makes it possible for educators and students of all ages to create high quality video projects in minutes. Binumi provides the essentials for video making by combining a vast royalty free multimedia library featuring over one million clips from around the globe with an easy to use online editor and cloud-based storage.
Multimedia is grouped into thousands of educational topics specifically organised according to an internationally standardised curriculum map, so students and teachers can easily navigate and select from subjects ranging from science to the arts. Users can kick-start their projects by selecting up to five topics to be the framework of their video and continue to the editor.
For quick results Binumi’s Instant Video tool automatically chooses the very best shots from your selected topics and immediately edits them to music. With Binumi you don't need any filmmaking skills or high tech equipment. Everything you need to create your video project can be done 100% on Binumi. Whether it’s just for fun or creating stunning multimedia presentations for the classroom, there’s no limit to the videos you can make.
Binumi was founded by Anthony Copping, a British born filmmaker, explorer and entrepreneur, who has appeared in over 135 countries worldwide as a TV presenter for National Geographic Channel.
Binumi's team of video and filmmaking professionals have spent several years shooting footage in over fifty countries. Even with a library of over a million clips, Binumi is adding at least 20,000 new clips made available every month to make sure every time you use Binumi it’s a unique and positive experience.
Have a smashing weekend everyone.
Best regards,
Neil
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