key digital literacy

[Joel Bloch]

My favorite digital literacy is digital story telling. I've introduced it as part of a writing course for the past year. Digital stories are personal stories voiced by the writer + images + a soundtrack. They allow students to explore the relationships between words and images, give them a sense both as a writer and a creator of digital content, and let them share their work with the classmates and anyone else they want to.They work with a variety of technologies - blogger to post and share drafts of their stories, audacity to record their stories, and moviemaker or Imovie to put their stories together. Their stories have been about a variety of topics: their families, their careers, their friends, their hobbies, - whatever they wanted to write about. I am also working with a group of students who are writing stories about their lives at the university, which will be used to help incoming students adjust to the problems international students face.

I haven't posted any of our students' stories, but if you are looking for more information, the best place to start is http://storycenter.org/.

You can also see some examples at our university's digital story project: http://digitalstory.osu.edu/stories.html.

There are slides of my most recent presentation at http://www.slideshare.net/cherepaha/digital-storytelling-in-the-l2-...

[Nina Liakos]

I looked at your slideshare presentation--very interesting. I wish I could have heard your commentary. I am not good at these tools. I seem to hit a wall every time I try to use Audacity, which even some of my technophobic colleagues have mastered (something about that LAME encoder I think, and it just looks complicated). But you make a very good case for learning to do this! Thanks for the nudge.