Empowering Students Through Multimedia Storytelling — from edutopia.org by Michael Hernandez
Excerpt:
Recent studies have proven that stories can change perceptions and even make people more tolerant. Rather than wait to be defined by others, it’s important that students learn to create understanding by sharing their story, their worldview, their concerns, and their triumphs with others.
Groups like Youth Radio and Cause Beautiful are empowering teens in poor and minority-majority neighborhoods to become multimedia journalists. Kids in these programs learn how to tell and share their own stories with a local or national audience.
No matter your class demographics or grade level, ELA and social studies teachers should integrate similar projects in their own classrooms, because every student will benefit from learning to craft a compelling visual story backed by persuasive facts and ideas.
What Is Multimedia Storytelling?
Students use video, audio, photography, web, and social media to craft documentaries and nonfiction stories about the world around them. These interdisciplinary projects allow students to focus on creating an authentic product that many people outside the classroom and their neighborhoods will see.
From DSC:
I am passionate about multimedia because the components of it — digital audio, digital video, text, graphics, animations, digital photography, and more — can create hugely powerful pieces of communication. Students need to be able to communicate — online. But it’s not just students. Each one of us needs to have an online-based footprint now in order to remain marketable. Multimedia can help relay our stories, our work, our dreams. It unleashes enormous amounts of energy and creativity inside of us.
I wish that more teachers and faculty members would seek to integrate multimedia-based assignments into their courses — or at least encourage the idea that this can be one of the acceptable ways that assignments can be turned in. At the same time, it can be one of the more interesting ways to assess learning and comprehension. Online-based resources like Lynda.com can help get students, teachers, and professors up the learning curves.
