The Digital Story as an Instructional Tool

Because I have worked with digital stories in past classes at the University of Lousiville, I decided to push myself a step further to create a digital story I could actually use with my students. I made a story to introduce a literacy project I plan to do with my students next year called, "Unlocking Poetry."

In this project, students will research a poem that has some sort of special meaning for them. The possibilities for student exploration are unlimited, and I will allow students to use musical lyrics, so long as they can document why the lyricas are poetic. The students will then be required to re-represent their poem in some artistic medium, whether clay, paint, charcoal, colored pencil or any thing else the students can imagine. They will then create digital stories in pairs, in which they will present their individual projects in a fluid and coherent way. Thus, I will push them to make new, more complex connections between individual projects to create a collaborative digital story.

My own digital story will serve as the hook, model, and inspiration for my students' projects.

When they see my former students' work, as well as a model of a digital story, I hope they will be inspired to create a unique and wonderful digital story to express a certain personal connection they had to a poem, and to then connect that in some comparison or contrast to another students' expression. From this project I not only hope that my students will gain technological experience and advancement, but also an appreciation of poetry, figurative language cognitive development, and collaborative working skills. Most importantly to me as a language arts teacher, this activiy should give them authentic access to unlock the mirror and window that is poetry.