Exploring Digital Storytelling

Today, I enjoyed beginning my exploration of the digital storytelling materials. I spent most of today exploring the Digital Storytelling Toolkit and previewing some of the videos that the students have made. Myrta's Story was of particular interest. Myrta is a migrant farm worker who moves from Texas to Utah each year as summer begins to pick fruit in Utah. Her story is amazing. Here is a quote from her story transcript. “My summers spent in and with the land have educated me. I still deplore thinning peaches, but I have an understanding of life and nature that makes my heart race. Every day that I begin before the sun is to my benefit. With this teacher, I have become a better student, not only of school, but also of life.” What strikes me about this particular site is the depth of valuable information and the emphasis on writing the story first. I like the ability to click on the different roles such as producer, writer, director, etc. to find out about what goes into doing each of these jobs in an exemplary fashion. Myrta's video is only 4 minutes, so if you have time explore this one. I also enjoyed exploring Andrei Leonov's flipstack book on Loons. It was a pleasure to see his citation page. I will be taking storytelling later this summer at the John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina. It will be interesting to compare live storytelling with digital storytelling and blending them somehow. I wrote a story over the weekend titled, Gulf Stream Gown which combines fiction and non-fiction about retrieving my 33 year old wedding gown from New Orleans. I am now thinking about how I could present this story digitally. I definitely think that the story has to be well written before digitizing and that this is the hard part about teaching digital storytelling as students often want to jump into the technology before the creative writing and/or research is done thoroughly.