Story Time, Online! #diglitclass

As a young child, what was your favorite thing to do before going to bed? For many children, it was story time. Parents all over the world read bedtime stories to their children to leave them with happy thoughts before drifting off to sleep. As children get older, bedtime stories occur less and less as children learn to read and grow up. Story telling turns into writing essays and filling out scholarship applications. However, the creation of podcasts and digital storytelling have brought back the love we as children had for story time as digital stories.

Educators are especially enjoying the benefits of podcasts in their classrooms and lessons. Podcasts are a great resource for supplementing lessons. These help students who are auditory learners and also just give students a different way to learn. Podcast and digital storytelling benefit students’ cognitive skills, speaking, and listening skills. These also are of interest to students due to their interest in technology. This is discussed in the article Teacher’s Guide to Digital Storytelling. This article also gives ideas for possible lessons that could involve podcasts and digital storytelling. Some ideas involve children interviewing people and making podcasts or digital stories. This helps develop communication skills. One disadvantage that I notice is that there are some students that have hearing impairments. There would have to be some written transcript or something for them to use to be able to learn the same things as the podcast.

I do think I will have students create both podcasts and digital story videos. I think it gets students thinking in a different way than simply reading something and doing a worksheet over it. Students learn secondary skills such as how to work as a team and problem solving. I also think that it is great to get students actually creating things. It shows them that they can do things they never thought about before. It gets them to explore their creative side. In my Art for the Elementary Teacher class, we had a whole unit over digital storytelling. We read several articles on this subject and then we created a stop motion video on a routine or story we wanted to tell. It was great to be able to have an assignment like this because I could really do whatever I wanted, within reason of course. I learned so much about myself as a student through doing this. I had to figure out what I wanted my story to be, how I wanted to set up the pictures, the format I wanted it in, and much more. I really find it interesting how two of my classes taught about the same topic, but were worlds away in the delivery and the focus of the topic. I find that in Digital Literacy, we focused heavily on technology and how that benefits our students to hear stories using technology. In my Art class, we focused on the storytelling portion. How telling stories benefits children and things like that. I think both classes taught the subject well, just with different viewpoints.

My biggest take away from this was that telling your own story, like the children did in this article, can bring you closer to your friends and family, and that technology is a great way to get your story out their for people to hear.

Photo CC- By Alan Levine