Digital Storytelling -- Writing For the Internet Age

Today we're talking about the Digital Storytelling, in which one uses the full complement of media
types available to people today -- audio, video, photos and drawings, animations, text, etc. -- to convey meaning in a way that is a little more innovative and perhaps more interesting than simply using text.

I have some experience with satire and digital storytelling, though it's nothing too fancy as far as the technology used. I've used photo-editing software (very, very poorly) to make posts like this one, where I compared Disney princesses to Milwaukee Brewers players. I also did this extremely silly piece of investigative journalism that became entirely too real.

As far as other forms of media are concerned, I do not have much experience working with video much, or with multimedia forms of digital storytelling. I do have a podcast that I co-host and produce, but I'm not sure that necessarily qualifies as "digital storytelling."

Thinking back to my experiences consuming this form of media, I remember watching silly Flash videos like End of the World, playing around with Homestar Runner and other things of that nature back in elementary and middle school. Today, I personally prefer reading text to watching videos in general, but almost every news article begins with a video related to the story below it.

One of the more interesting ideas I saw in the examples of digital storytelling was the idea of interactive fiction. I've not played or seen Heavy Rain, but I have seen games and interactive movies like it, like the Walking Dead games. I'm not sure how one would incorporate these into the classroom -- the creation of something like that would probably involve a time commitment and level of expertise that is beyond the scope of a high school English course.

I do like the idea of using video to have students create their own public service announcements. This has a multi-layered ability to teach students: they'll be writing their own script and learning how to use tools to create and produce video. Perhaps most importantly, they'll be doing research on an important issue that they'll be able to dive into and not only learn some things about themselves, but teach others about it with their project.

Writing coaching: Living the Achievement Gap

My first experiences with coaching young writers has certainly been eye opening. Over the past year and a half since I've restarted my own educational journey as a Master's student at UW-Milwaukee, of course I've learn a lot about the theory of teaching English to students, about what to expect in the classroom, and about how I can best use my own expertise to assist students in becoming better readers and writers themselves. However, as is so often the case, there's is nothing quite like getting that hands-on experience.

The progression of the students I have worked with so far has turned out to be very much like turning on a video game for the first time. As we began working with students from Kohler High School, I was somewhat shocked to see the impressive level of skill from these young writers. Both students I worked with introduced themselves as freshmen, but when I read their essays, I felt very much like I was reading the work of freshmen in college, not high school. It was a joy because although I felt like I didn't have all that much to teach them to be perfectly honest, I found myself able to really focus in on some higher-order issues that they could work on, as well as being able to offer plenty of praise.

As the next waves of writers began to roll in, however, it became clear to be that the first round had merely been the game's tutorial, and now that I had pressed "OK" to acknowledge I understood the basics of game play, I was being fully thrown into the fire. While there were certainly positive things that I could see in the writing from the rest of the students I worked with, there were a number of mechanical issues that I felt I needed to help correct before I could even begin to attack the meatier issues of their content. The basics of punctuation usage, capitalization, singular/plural agreement and sentence structure were real problems throughout the essays of the rest of the students I worked with, in some places making it hard for me to even understand what the student was trying to say, which of course makes it difficult to engage students regarding higher-order concerns.

As you may have guessed from the title of this post, the disparity between the students from Kohler High School and the other students I have worked with is another example of the black/white and urban/suburban achievement gaps. Kohler is a suburb of Sheboygan, which is itself a suburb of Milwaukee. It is populated with families of relatively high social-economic status, and is largely composed of white people. The other students I worked with were from the city of Milwaukee, many of them were students of color, and the areas they come from are substantially lower social-economic areas. I won't attack the causes of this issue in this post, or it's solutions -- that has been and will continue to be covered ad nauseum by those much smarter than me. But I hope that the work that I do with students can contribute to helping to close that gap.