The Seven Elements of Digital Storytelling

"You Are Your Future"

Element #1: Point of View

The point of view is that of Vincentsia Kelveh-Sonaths.

Vincentsia Kelveh-Sonaths

Element #2: Dramatic Question

The dramatic question is when did the narrator take the first step into making decisions for herself?

Element #3: Emotional Content

This story is very emotional for the narrator, because she was so young and she thought that she was in love. The hormones that teenagers are subject to can make subjects like relationships and sex very emotional.

Element #4: Your Voice

The use of her voice as opposed to just text on a screen is that it gives the listener a much more emotional story. You are able to hear the happiness, pain, and every other emotion in the narrator’s voice during the video.

Element #5: Sound Track

The story had n music in it, which made the narrators voice that much more important to the story, as it had to convey all the emotion itself.

Element #6: Economy

The narrator has a very good since of timing and transitions, and you are never left lost or confused during the story. She uses a variety of pictures as well as video camera footage that goes along with the subject of the story.

Element #7: Pacing

The narrator has very good pacing. She speaks slowly and clearly (although in a different language. Subtitles are included) She includes pauses in all the right places, and the story is just under four minutes. 

Everyone Around You Has A Story The World Needs To Hear

In my opinion StoryCorps is a great program. Giving people a way to have a meaningful discussion or interview with either a loved one, or complete stranger, is a powerful thing. It gives people a platform to say something they might otherwise have said, or tell a story for the last time. Having it recorded gives it the extra benefit of being passed down from generation to generation. To me the most powerful story presented was the one with Oshea and Mary, which was a very emotionally charged story, and really shows the goodness that people are capable of. All it takes is to sit down and talk. 

Infusing Digital and Media Literacy Across the Curriculum.

“When Jessica Brown, principal of the Arts Academy at Benjamin Rush High School in Philadelphia got the opportunity to write a mission statement for her school, she knew it was important to connect the fine and performing arts and literacy, so she prioritized a focus on visual and media literacy skills for the whole school.”

Focusing on the fine and performing arts and connecting them to literacy is special to me being a music educator. Studies show that students who participate in the fine arts excel in language development, spatial-temporal skills, and gain an increase in IQ. Connecting the fine arts and literacy, which priorities in visual and media literacy will give students the ability to process and better understand information in the digital age.

“In collaboration with students, parents, faculty, and school leaders, each school and community needs to develop an effective policy for acceptable use of technology that works for the needs of their students. Too many schools and educators are fighting a losing battle with cells phones, iPods, social media, and other technology devices. After all, when you have a computer in your pocket, you’re going to want to use it.”

I agree with this statement 100%. Like the book states, educators are fighting a losing when it comes to personal technology in classrooms. That battle was even recently in the public eye when a school officer was recorded throwing a student out of their chair, allegedly because the student was using their phone in class. While this unfortunate situation escalated from there, it could have easily been a nonissue if the teacher, and the school, had better policy on technology, and its use and incorporation in the classroom.

“Use collaborative multimedia composition to produce authentic communication. Learners work together to compose new messages using media genres and forms that are appropriately challenging and meaningful for them to share their ideas with real audience.”

This is a good rule, because when the students go out in the real world careers having the ability to collaborate with their colleagues will be a valuable skill. Having students compose new challenging media messages together will allow them to see multiple sides to the same story, which will allow them to tell a more complete story.

Teaching With Current Events

What I really took away from the text reading, the video Journalism Revived, as well as the articles on Authentic Learning, and Place-Based Education is that it is incredibly important that students gain real world experience and knowledge, and that they gain the critical thinking skills and motivation needed to shift through the fast array of information available in the digital age.

Students how have the ability to look up information on any subject at any time with modern technology. This however comes with a price. Misinformation is abundant on the internet, and being able to connect information is key for our students to determine what is newsworthy, and how to understand it better.

In the Journalism Revived video Sarah Stuteville talked about how her and her friends went out and traveled the world to hear and tell these stories, and then they brought all the experience and knowledge back with them and put it into the community with their students program that teaches students to create digital media messages, and tell their own personal stories.

Authentic learning ties into Stutesville’s students learning program because that’s exactly what the students do. The students use the hands on skills they learn in this program and us them to tell high quality, personal digital stories, be it on a local level, national, or a global event. Place based education ties in with all of this because it gives students real world skills and experience within their own community.

My Digital Story

Digital Story Storyboard

*voice over*

Video of myself speaking Background Music

This quote from popular British television show Doctor Who really captures the main point of this digital story. Viewing our lives from the day to day perspective it does feel like much changes. We seemingly do the same repetitive tasks and it all just becomes a blur. But we are obviously different people than we were a year ago, or even five years ago.

Video of myself speaking Background Music

So today I’d like to ask: When did we change? When was the turning point from who you were, to who you are now, at this moment. This story is from one of the more major turning points in my life, because it gave me a more positive outlook on life.

Video of myself speaking Background Music

It was July 4th 2014, at around 10:30 at night. I had decided that I was going to walk to the basketball court that was located near my house in order to see the fireworks. When I got there I decided to lay down on the concrete in order to get a better view of them.

Video of myself speaking Background Music

They ended around 11, but it was still quite warm out, so I decided to stay there and admire the sky, which is something I don’t normally take time to do. During this time the clouds and the night sky seemed so much more interesting, beautiful, and somehow more important than it ever did before.

Video of myself speaking Background Music

While watching the sky I began to be very introspective about my life at that moment, and what I was happy and unhappy with. I was viewing my passive and negative attributes in a way that I had never done in my life before.

Video of myself speaking Background Music

It was one of those long nights where it is just you and your thoughts. I was unhappy with where I was in life. I was probably the most boring person in the world, just going to work, then coming home just to watch TV. I had horrible eating habits, and I was not taking care of my mind or body.

Video of myself speaking Background Music

.I began to think about what I perceived was important and valuable to me in life, such as wanting to travel the world and experience different places and cultures. I realized how amazing and ever changing the world is, and that it never remains the same for a single second, and that there is so much to see.

Video of myself speaking Background Music Collection of outer space and Earth scenery

I promised myself at that moment that I was going to go out and see the world. To go out and make a story worth telling. I also realized that I had to live my life for myself, and that taking care of myself, both physically and mentally, would help change my life around. Since this turning point in my life I have done exactly that. I spend my time living in the moment, and experiencing all that I can, while making memories with good friends, in beautiful places.

Digital Story Topic

5. In looking back on your life, you may be able to identify particular “turning points” – episodes through which you experienced an important change in your life. Please choose one key turning point scene and describe it in detail. If you feel your life story contains no clear turning points, then describe a particular episode in your life that comes closer than any other to qualifying for a turning point – a scene where you changed in some way. Again, please describe what led up to the event, what happened in the event, where and when it happened, who was involved, what you were thinking and feeling, and so on. Also, please tell me how you think you changed as a result of this event and why you consider this event to be an important scene in your life story today.

“We all change when you think about it. We’re all different people all throughout our lives.”

– The Doctor

I think the biggest turning point in my life happened in the summer of 2014. It was the 4^th of July at around 10:30 p.m. There was a basketball court just a few minutes’ walk from where I was living and I decided to go out to it and watch the fireworks. I walked out to the court and decided to lay down on the concrete to watch the fireworks. After the fireworks were done it was about 11 o’clock but still quite warm out, and I decided to stay and just watch the sky, which is something I don’t normally take time to do. During this time the clouds and the sky seemed the most interesting, beautiful, and important view in the world to me. While watching the sky I began to be introspective about my life at that moment, and what I was happy and unhappy with. I was viewing my positive and negative attributes in a way that I had never view them before. I thought about what I thought was important and valuable to me in life, such as wanting to travel the world and experience just how amazing, and ever changing the world is, because I realized that it only lasts of a second, and then it’s gone. I promised myself in that moment that I was not going to waste my life waiting for positive things to happen to me, that I was going to go out and make my own story. Since that time I have done exactly that. I spend my time experiencing all that I can, while making memories with friends, and good people.  

Protection and Empowerment

Three things I learned about storytelling are that children are easily influenced by the stories that they hear/view, we gain a greater understanding of things when we have more than a single story, and that it is easy to fall into the trap of a single story, but the most important thing I learned is that it is dangerous to have only a single story for reference, as nothing in life, no place, person, or event, is that simple.

“Once they got started, Mrs. Jenkins found herself not fully understanding what children were saying. She had to ask clarifying questions of the students to elicit more details and context in order to fully understand the ideas and information they were sharing. As she asked these questions more and more hands were in the air. Students were clearly energized by the process of sharing their knowledge.

I think that the strategy of connecting your lessons with something that the students are familiar with is a great way to get the students engaged. Asking the clarifying questions helps the students put more thought into the answers that they give, and will allow them to make even more connections. When students are engaged and excited about the lesson more meaningful learning occurs.

“We talked about the need to empathize with the people who were experiencing loss and to honor those who made efforts to help. We talked about how media messages about the disaster and its aftermath of two wars were shaping our own sense of national identity and the fresh fears we had as adults about how people around the world perceived our country, the world’s largest superpower.”

Empathy, the ability to understand and share the feeling of another, is in my opinion one of the most important qualities that we as people have. Now so more than ever communication is a large portion of our lives. We are in constant contact of the world around us, and being able to relate to and understand other people intellectually and emotionally is more important than ever.

“Some educators attempt to disrupt students’ pleasure with advertising and media culture by demonstrating how advertising promotes “a sense of inadequacy anxiety, shame, yearning, envy and contempt for the self or the other.” Because the values of consumer culture are so deeply woven into the fabric of our society, providing students with a disruptive, alternative interpretation of advertising may create a shock to the system that moves students toward critical distance.”

More and more we are bombarded by advertising, a necessary evil in my opinion that allows creators of digital media to create stories of a higher quality, and our students having the ability to objectively view media messages of advertising, among other things, and understand the meaning and purpose of them is incredibly important. 

Composing Across Media

Three things I learned about storytelling are that it is joke telling, knowing your punch line, your ending, but the most important thing I learned is that it confirms some truth that depends our understand about who we are as humans.

 “Using creativity and imagination, as if working for an advertising agency, each student developed a way to “sell” the element by using image composition tools to create a propaganda poster.” I picked this quote because it is very close to an activity I had my students do during my time student teaching at East Fairmont High School. In this case I gave each of the students in my music appreciation class a classical composer that they were to research. Part of the assignment included writing a research paper about the composer, but I also had them create concert posters for their composer. I gave them complete freedom to design the poster they just had to include at least two pieces that they composed, and date and place that the pieces could have been performed at. The picture at the top is an example of the students work. While doing this I found the students to be more engaged in research than they were for just writing the paper.