My experience with digital storytelling and multimodal composition is limited. It was the year after I left that students in my school district were all given Chromebooks to take home with them to work on schoolwork and to do their projects on. Because my teachers couldn't guarantee that their students would have access to technology at home to work with tech, I never had a lot of assignments that made them necessary. Apart from this reality, I would have to say that the most interesting program out there at the time to do anything academic on was probably PowerPoint...maybe Prezi, but that program was a pain in you know what to figure out.
After Viewing the course website examples of multimodal composition, the ones that stick out to me the most are the book trailers and the digital storytelling. Although writing is an important skill to learn, I see how it could be important to encourage students to use these forms of learning as well as it gives them a different way to express what they have learned and what they know. Often times the struggle with teaching writing is getting kids to say what they mean--they can't figure out how to say it, but with book trailers and digital storytelling, those forms of assignments give students the opportunity to show what they know. These activities could be used as a pre-writing activity as it helps students to pick out what's important and it gets them put them in sequential order. This is exactly what writing does, however, students are more likely to be able to put what they know into something of a visual expression easier than they would be able to put what they know first into writing.
If we can get kids to easily do the process that we want them to do one way, it'll make it that much easier for them to convert it into an academic style.
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If we can get kids to easily do the process that we want them to do one way, it'll make it that much easier for them to convert it into an academic style.
Hi Ally,
ReplyDeleteYou have some great thoughts here! My high school had chrome books available to us, but many of the teachers did not understand how to implement technology. Consequently, we rarely extended passed powerpoint.
Writing a long essay is not fun and often a challenge for any student. By offering them a more creative option, they get the chance to express their skills and the knowledge they have gained. Potentially, they could even retain more information from the digital component vs. the essay.
Hi Ally!
ReplyDeleteI didn't get a laptop until I came to college. It was never necessary, because we never had to do anything "online". I still remember receiving those packets that EVERYONE hates now.
I absolutely dislike Prezi... so much.. I had one teacher use it for EVERYTHING and I just began to hate it.
Thanks for sharing!