Show and Tell: Students Are Using Cutting-Edge Visual Technologies to Bring the Age-Old Art of Storytelling from the Spoken and Written Tradition into the Digital Age

BRIAN CROSBY'S 27 students at Agnes Risley Elementary School in Sparks, NV, announce themselves with this banner at the top of their blog: are a fifth-grade class that is piloting a 1-to-1 laptop program using iBook computers. We blog, Skype, make wiki pages, [and] produce digital videos, podcasts, and vidcasts. That's a lot to take on, and not what you might expect of a class in which four out of five students do not speak English at home and 90 percent receive federally funded free or reduced-price lunches--a group that can be easily categorized as at-risk kids. But Crosby, their innovative teacher, believes his students are more than just a demographic sample: They demonstrate the powerful educational utility of digital storytelling. piloters of the school's 1-to-1 program, Crosby's students each have an Apple (www.apple.com) iBook, which Crosby was able to equip them with after the school purchased a fresh supply of computers. With the laptops, Crosby has turned his kids into active bloggers. concentrate on language because most of them are not fluent in their native language or in English, Crosby says. In order to blog, you have to stop and think about what you're going to say before you say it. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Blogging has brought Crosby's class in touch with students in such wide-ranging locations as Thailand, Canada, and Florida, and this year the technology was used for a collaborative storytelling project with a fifth-grade class in Long Island, NY. Pairs of Crosby's students joined with pairs of kids in the Long Island class to write a story based on one of the 14 drawings in the picture book The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. The students used Google Docs (http://documents.google.com) to expand on and edit each other's work in real time, and VoIP provider Skype (www.skype.com) to work together by videoconference, brainstorming face-to-face about setting, character, plot, word choice--all the components of a story. (The completed works are posted at http://classroombooktalk. wikispaces.com/Mysteries+of+Harris+Burdick.) Crosby encourages his students to employ technologies at their disposal to tell stories in meaningful ways. He started with this same group last year as fourth-graders, and he will stay with them again next year in grade 6. His role has been as a facilitator, helping with the creative process. As they become sixth-graders, he says, I will be stepping back to let them continue to develop storytelling strategies for themselves. Digital storytelling is a modern take on an oral and written tradition that traces back to early human history as a way of passing down institutional knowledge and beliefs from generation to generation. Proponents of the methodology, such as Maria Davenport, director of learning and technology at TIES (Technology Information Education Services; www.ties.k12.mn.us), an education technology collaborative of 38 Minnesota school districts, believe that merging technology and curriculum in this way allows learners to retain information on multiple levels, which makes retrieval easier. On a given topic, kids can create their own stories, using the internet to bring in their own videos and graphics, Davenport says. When that story is communicated to someone else, the child has a much more meaningful experience. TIES has created a three-day digital storytelling academy that it offers for 15 to 20 teachers twice per school year. The classes address writing, editing, and storyboarding, with much hands-on learning aided by the use of tools such as Adobe Photoshop (www.adobe.com); Apple's iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand; and Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net) for editing audio. TIES teaches the storytelling processes and concepts developed by Bernajean Porter, author of DigiTales: The Art of Telling Digital Stories. Porter's website (www.digitales.us) was an outgrowth of the book and is a guide for educators on how to make the best use of digital storytelling in classroom instruction. …

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