Writing Prompts

Yesterday in class, Ellen gave us a writing prompt that I felt was very effective in generating hidden stories within each of us. She asked us to first think of a place or a location and then to create a list of things that we see in this location. We made the list first and had to work on it for about 5-6 minutes.

I chose my backporch as location and generated the following list:
green soft chair
glass table
iron chairs with green cushions
screens coated with pollen
gas grill
gas grill utensils
stool
over the table light
power outlet
screen door
trees outside of porch
view of pond
steps to house
house door
cooking rack
candle on table
wooden floor planks
house windows
board siding
tin pans
grease pan
sounds of birds
wasps inside porch

Ellen stopped us and then asked us to circle one of the items on our list and then use it to write about for the next seven minutes.

Here's what I wrote ---

I sit on the back porch in the green padded chair. It's the only chair that's really comfortable to me. Even though it's metal, like the other ones, this chair has thicker foam cushions on both the bottom and the back.

I usually sit in the green chair in the early evening after I come home from work. Usually I carry out my glass of white wine too and just sit and stare through the screen at the pond.

The pond is somewhat far from the porch. The yard is shaded now with trees grown tall and full. The trees screen the late afternoon sun and cast shadows over the manicured grass and small flower bed. Beyond the trees, the lawn opens to the sun and the pond rests just beyond.

I think now with an almost dull sense of memories past. The pond was not always there. We had it dug when Julie was just a baby. I remember its first muddy appearance in the yard. Rough edges and dirty water just beginning to fill the gap left by the trucks.

Over the years, the pond became smooth and a natural part of the landscape. I would sit for hours each day when the kids were small. We designed the pond to be kid safe -- no steep edges allowed. The banks dropped ever so slightly downward. The bottom of the pond had been filled with small soft stones. No mud between the toes! We would sit in the shallow edge and splash water to keep us cool.


That's as far as I got.

I didn't share this in class, wanting to hear from others first. Those who did share had beautifully written stories making me think how a prompt like this is just enough to spark an idea that meanders and wanders into other thoughts. It made me realize how many stories each of us has to tell.

Decisions, Decisions

This last week, I've been plugging away at getting everything ready for our course to begin on Monday. It's been admittedly easier this year because we have the work from last year's course to draw upon and we have the work and experiences of our students to learn from. Today, I've spent time tweaking the introduction to digital storytelling presentation. The problem that I have is that there are so many great examples to show -- which ones should I choose, especially considering the range and interests of the participants in class this year?

I still have to start with my favorite story -- the one that hooked me into digital storytelling in the first place. It's a few years old now -- produced by Sylvia Jeong in 2004 when she was in 9th grade. You can find it at: http://dsi.kqed.org/index.php/contest/about/C24/. This story has all the "elements" -- imagination, creativity, voice, and emotional content. It tells the story of this young girl simply, yet reveals her inner strength and determination to do well in America. When I think about the time and effort Sylvia took to create her "potato" sets and images, my appreciation grows even stronger.

The stories that come from our pre-service teachers as they describe their literacy autobiographies also provide a wealth of great examples. They illustrate so well the points that Sara Kajder makes in Bringing the Outside In: Visual Ways to Engage Reluctant Readers. It's too bad that these are not shared on the web so that more people can see them.

And then ... we have some wonderful examples from the people who took the course in 2007. Some of the best work from the course happened in the first week ... when the stories were truly personal reflections. Last year, the course format was slightly different. We had people create a personal narrative the first week of class, but the final project was to create an exemplar that would accompany a unit of study where digital storytelling was used. In some cases, these exemplars felt a bit forced to fit the assignment. So this year, Ellen and I decided to stick with personal experience only -- the final project being a digital story about one's self accompanied by the written script and storyboard.

I'm certainly looking forward to working with our participants this summer and learning more about them through this process.

Beginnings

In truth, my current interests in digital storytelling began quite a few years ago. I was working for The University of Vermont (or UVM for short) as part of the PT3 grant. At the time, we had secured some funding from a partnership with Vermont Institute for Math, Science, and Technology (VISMT -- no longer in business) to develop a web site that told the story of a few Vermont educators who were integrated technology into their classroom practices. From this partnership, I created a web site called VT3 -- Vermont Teachers Teaching with Technology. At this site, I tell the story of a few Vermont educators. I interviewed each person and from this created short video clips about them or their work. I wanted VT3 to have more than just these resources, so I included links to other video stories about teachers that I found on the web. I also wanted to provide links to resources useful to teachers who were interested in learning more about how technology could be used to improve student learning. Somewhere in this process, I learned about digital storytelling and the work of the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley. From this point on, I was hooked. The stories I had created could in fact be considered digital stories, but I learned that the format being used by Jim Lambert and others was more focused, usually contained a message or personal reflection about an event in life that had somehow changed one's insight, focus, or direction.

Shortly after this project ended, I began to work as a professional development coordinator for our second PT3 grant that dealt with electronic portfolios. It was through this position that I met Cynthia Reyes, a middle level education professor. She was interested in integrating technology into one of her literacy courses. We began to work together in Fall 2006. In her course, students create a literacy autobiography to reflect upon their personal journeys into literacy. We decided that having students create a digital story about one episode in this journey would work well. The results we saw with these student products convinced both of us early on about the power and potential of using this form of expression to increase both literacy and technology skills. We've been working together since then and continue to believe that digital storytelling is helping us (and our students) understand more about each other previous methods.

During the summer of 2007, I and Ellen Thompson (a literacy educator from UVM also) created a course geared to Vermont K-12 teachers in which we combine literacy development using personal narrative and memoir writing with the technology of digital storytelling. I created research protocols for my students in this course, received IRB approval from UVM and have begun to track their use and application on digital storytelling in their classrooms. This summer we are offering the course again, and I have created this blog to document my thinking about this second offering of the course and my ongoing research for the year ahead.

More to follow ...