Course | What’s YOUR Story? The Art of Digital Storytelling

Facilitator

Joe Herz
B.S., M.A. in Educational Technology.
K-8 General Ed; K-12 Technology 30+ years.

Site and District Tech Coordinator; Technology Program Planner; Conference Presenter; Author.

"My current educational goal is to aid in the development of effective and responsible technology use by all students and innovative technology implementation by teachers."

Joe’s personal interests include: Music (guitar/drums), his classic VW bus and helping with local animal rescues.

Description

EDUO 9130
Digital Storytelling is the practice of using technology tools to help tell a meaningful and often heartfelt story. Digital stories are planned. They have a beginning, a middle and an end. The story itself is the most important ingredient. Technology tools add visual and auditory enhancements but the story itself is the key ingredient. Without a good story what you see and hear is fleeting. Merging a good story with even simple tech enhancements creates a memorable product.

As with traditional storytelling, most digital stories focus on a specific topic and contain a particular point of view. However, as the name implies, digital stories usually contain some mixture of computer-based images, text, recorded audio narration, video clips, and/or music. Digital stories can vary in length, but most of the stories used in education typically last between 2 and 10 minutes. The topics used in digital storytelling range from personal tales to the recounting of historical events, from exploring life in one’s own community to the search for life in other corners of the universe, and literally, everything in between.

Digital Storytelling content has many categories.

- Biographical (Ken Burns type) Informational/Explanatory, Narrative
- Student-Created Tutorials – Informational/Explanatory
- Public Service Announcements – Informational/Explanatory & Argument
- Focus on Research and Informational Text
- Historical Docudramas – Informational/Explanatory, Narrative

Remember: Digital Stories are “told”. They are not fact-filled reports. They don’t have bullet-points, fancy bells and whistles or links to anywhere. They are told in first-person or second-person voices. They are after all, stories.

Syllabus

Course Objectives
In this course you will have opportunity to:
a. Understand Storytelling and its place in all curriculums and in specific Common Core curriculum areas and use of Critical Thinking
b. Learn about available digital tools that can be used to create Storytelling projects
c. Plan, create and publish a Digital Storytelling project
d. Create plans for students to develop curriculum-based Digital Storytelling projects

For further information about the syllabus, please visit Dominican University of California website.

Semester Credits

2

Credit may be available for this course and may vary by country or institution. Please verify eligibility with Dominican University of California.