EDUC 422c Blog 1

 Capturing Stories, Creating Lives

Blog 1

What: Describe in detail what this article is about. Who wrote it and what are their interests in this subject?

This article, written by David S. Jakes is called Capturing Stories, Capturing Lives: An introduction to Digital Storytelling is about Digital Storytelling and the learning experience it provides. Jakes explains digital storytelling as an author’s story or in this case, students story projected on a computer screen, using images, voice and music. Jakes breaks up this idea into 6 different steps to provide the total learning experience. 1. Writing 2. Script 3. Storyboard 4. Locating Multimedia 5. Creating the digital story and 6. Sharing that story. All of these steps involve the students creating, searching the internet, allowing them to explore themselves and what they can do using the web. 

So What: Of what significance is this article? What did you learn or did you gain new understandings? How has this impacted your learning? Are there parts you would like further explained?

This article is extremely significant because it is explaining to us, future educators about an idea that we can use with our students. The article is allowing us the chance to give our students an opportunity to be creative using a high quality learning experience. This idea of digital story telling gives students the chance to write, and then create a script off of what they wrote, find multimedia to match that script and then create their story digitally and share their work that they are proud of making. 

Now What:

I find this to be an amazing activity for students in my future classroom. It would have to be an activity used in the upper elementary grades and it would take a lot of time, but imagine all of the different learning skills that are being used and how engaged students will be. Saving this article will remind me of exactly what it means to create a digital storyboard and how to go about doing so in my classroom.  I agree with Jakes when he says that creating a digital story for students “provides one of the best learning experiences available to students” it keeps them engaged, focused and brings in many aspects of learning that are truly needed for every student. This creation will be something they remember forever. 

Jakes, D. S. (2006, December 29). Capturing Stories, Capturing Lives: An Introduction to Digital Storytelling. In JakesOnline. Retrieved November 9, 2012, from http://www.jakesonline.org/storytelling.htm