Digital Storytelling

by Christy Ferrens, English Teacher and Technology Coordinator

While surfing the internet one evening I discovered UMBC’s Telly award-winning project, Digital Stories from Charlestown. Their project paired UMBC students with residents of Charlestown Retirement Community who collaborated to produce first-person narratives about the Charlestown residents’ lives. I was immediately moved and began investigating ways to bring the concept to SPSG.

I attended an Educators’ Workshop at the non-profit Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, California, this past summer. There I learned the digital storytelling process by using Macintosh software to produce my own digital story. As well as teaching the production techniques, the workshop afforded me the opportunity to collaborate with teachers from all over the world on ways to integrate the process into middle and upper school curriculum. The workshop was a life-changing experience that invigorated me with the possibilities for our students.

Upon returning to SPSG, this fall I established a Digital Storytelling Club in the Upper School. The mission of the club is to collect the history and traditions of the school. The club hosted an afternoon tea to introduce the Digital Storytelling Project to several SPSG faculty members who helped to start the school with Mrs. Rosalind Levering.

We then began the interviewing process of several of these former faculty members. The student who conducts the interview is responsible for producing that individual’s digital story. We work collaboratively with each individual to write a script which will be recorded as the voiceover for the digital story.

With the assistance of our archivist Nancy Marbury we are delving into our archives for visual artifacts to support the SPSG stories these women have to tell. Second semester we started a second tier of the project by beginning to interview current or recently retired faculty who have served the SPSG community for 25 years or more. We also began work with a handful of recent graduates during Winter Break to mine for SPSG stories. The club’s goal is to produce 10 digital stories by the end of this school year. Our hope is that the oral history we collect will help us to celebrate SPSG’s 50th Anniversary in 2009-2010.

The addition of nine MacBooks to the vast tablet program at SPSG enabled me to begin curriculum integration of digital storytelling. Mrs. Wilson’s seventh grade language lab classes were the first students to produce digital stories using the MacBooks. The 14 students worked diligently to produce stories honoring their grandparents. They crafted and recorded first-person narratives, collected still images and music with which to illustrate their pieces, and edited their own stories using Garage Band, iTunes, and iMovie.

It was an arduous process for some students who had never worked in a Mac platform before, but the final products were worth the hard work. The movies were premiered to an audience of grandparents and special guests on Grandparents’ Day. The heartfelt messages of the stories were powerful and elicited an emotional response and much praise from the audience.

Mrs. Blackman’s Honors Geometry IX class has also recently completed digital stories exploring the Chaos Theory. These stories are part of the inter-disciplinary program, Journey through Exploration that Mrs. Blackman and Dr. NB, biology teacher, coordinate for their ninth grade Honors Geometry and Biology students. Some of the stories produced are original, fictional explorations of the chaos theory, while others are inspired by historical figures, scientific theories, or ordinary people these students encountered in the media.

Interspersed throughout the visual images the students selected to illustrate their stories are fractals they created in Geometer’s Sketchpad. The process the students accomplished in producing these stories combined skills they are developing in their math, science, English, and technology courses. Selected stories from this impressive collection of student products will be showcased at the Journey Night in April.

Mrs. Coffey’s three sections of tenth grade English completed an exercise in economy when they condensed creative stories that they had written for their Their Eyes Are Watching God unit. The purpose of their assignment was to develop metaphors with nature imagery to illustrate an aspect or experience of their lives.

These first-person narratives, which focused on topics like friendship or familial relationships, attending new schools, and passion for extracurricular activities, were perfect for the digital storytelling format. The students combined personal photographs with beautiful images of the natural world to visually enhance their metaphors.

The communication and technical skills students gain from producing a digital story are valuable skills they will build upon in the future. The scripts for digital stories can range in length, but we encourage the students to limit their scripts to between 300-500 words. These concise depictions of feelings or emotions encourage economy in writing while providing exploration of personal voice.

Photo, sound, and film editing are also processes that require precision and are necessary life skills in the digital world. Completing these projects is a challenging task that requires commitment and perseverance from the students. I have so pleased to work with students as they problem-solve and to witness their creative process unfold.