All student projects/products begin with two basic Understanding by Design (Wiggins) questions, so that student work adds intellectual value (standards, skills, deep enduring understandings) rather than being created for fun/motivation or to practice technical skills:
- What knowledge, skills, and deep understandings do you want students to have with this unit of study? (Learning Outcomes Remembered 5-Plus Years)
- How will students demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and deep understandings of this unit of study? (Evidence of Learning)
With time considered a limited resource, the time needed to develop digital storytelling products at first glance seem a frivolous use of classroom time unless creative teachers find or steal extra time from other work. But when examining the multitude of skills and connections to other national curriculum initiatives, creating digital storytelling products can easily stack a multitude of skills and results that really have BIG payoffs for the time invested in student digital storytelling products.
A Baker's Dozen Digital Storytelling Skills
Below are brief definition excerpts from Chapter 4 — "Storying Around for 21st Century Skills" — of DigiTales: the Art of Telling Digital Stories. The following skills have been identified and cross-referenced with National Standards, NETS-S, and 21st Century Skills.
- Cognitive Apprenticeship — practicing real-world work of digital communication
- Creativity and Inventive Thinking — creating multi-sensory experiences for others
- Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) — going beyond existing information to add personal meaning and understanding
- Enduring Understanding — by telling the story of what you know and understand for others, authors deepen their own self-meaning of the topic
- Visual Literacy — using images to show, not tell, the narrative story
- Technical Literacy — mastering the craftsmanship of applying the technology tools to create powerful communication, not to just use the tools, but to mix and dance the media into illuminated understandings
- Information (Media) Literacy — thinking, reading, writing, and designing effective media information
- Effective Communication — reading and writing information beyond words
- Multiple Intelligences and Learning Styles — addressing not only the opportunity for students to use their preferred mode of learning and thinking, but also enabling them to practice the effective use of all modalities
- Teaming and Collaboration — growing skills through practiced opportunities to co-produce group projects
- Project Management Mentality — Melvin Levin's challenge for students to practice time management of complex, involved tasks to successfully meet deadlines modeling real-world tasks
- Exploring Affinity — Melvin Levin's findings that when students create meaningful, engaged work, they discover themselves as successful learners.
National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)
Many of the curriculum standards developed for digital storytelling are drawn from English/Language Arts. But any state that has communication skills as part of math, science, social studies, and other areas will find a common thread of curriculum that expands beyond words for students to think, read, write, and express their thinking and understandings. Writing has long been shown to help students find their understandings, not just report them. The process of getting concepts from inside to outside is a journey in awareness.
Three position statements from NTCE combine to support digital storytelling curriculum in schools, creating a well-founded basis for expanding communication across the curriculum beyond text and traditional writing styles. The heart of digital storytelling is creating a tightly written narrative script. The rigorous work invested in the script engages students in purposeful written skills along with oral language skills needed to digitize their script into a voiceover. At least 30 percent-40 percent of production time is spent finding their story and preparing the script.
- (1975) NCTE Position Statement Promoting Media Literacy
Digital technology demand new critical student abilities in developing essential skills with a new form of literacy — "in reading, listening, viewing, and thinking" that would enable students to deal constructively with complex new modes of delivering information, new multisensory tactics for persuasion, and new technology-based art forms.
- (1992) NCTE Position Statement: Promoting Storytelling
Storytelling is a universal tool for communicating understanding between cultures and generations. It is how people learned their history, settled their arguments, and came to make sense of the phenomena of their world. Storytelling is an important vehicle for passing on factual information. It is unsurpassed as a tool for learning about ourselves, about the ever-increasing information available to us, and about the thoughts and feelings of others.
- (2003) NCTE Position Statement: On Composing With Non-print Media
Teachers are challenged to develop instructional strategies for students to master composing in non-print media that can include any combination of visual art, motion (video and film), graphics, text, and sound — all of which are frequently written and read in nonlinear fashion.
Twenty-first Century Skills
One of the more recent set of standards emerging to shape curriculum in schools are known as the 21st Century Skills. There are four categories, each containing a set of expectations. The process of digital storytelling encompasses 18 of the 20 expectations for what learning students will need for their work world.
- Digital Age Literacies
- Inventive Thinking
- Effective Communication
- High Productivity
National Standards for Visual Arts Education
Achievement components from the content standards:
Standard 1
- Students use different media, techniques, and processes to communicate ideas, experiences, and stories.
- Students select media, techniques, and processes; analyze what makes them effective or not effective in communicating ideas; and reflect upon the effectiveness of their choices.
Standard 2
- Students describe how different expressive features and organizational principles cause different responses.
- Students employ organizational structures and analyze what makes them effective or not effective in the communication of ideas.
Standard 3
- Students select and use subject matter, symbols, and ideas to communicate meaning.
Standard 5
- Students reflect analytically on various interpretations as a means for understanding and evaluating works of visual art.
- Students correlate responses to works of visual art with various techniques for communicating meanings, ideas, attitudes, views, and intentions.
Standard 6
- Students compare the materials, technologies, media, and processes of the visual arts with those of other arts disciplines as they are used in creation and types of analysis.
- Students compare characteristics of visual arts within a particular historical period or style with ideas, issues, or themes in the humanities or science.
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