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.