Reading Takeaways

Image credit: Mike Tinnion on Unsplash

Digital Storytelling in the Elementary Classroom. Youtube Video, 5 min. June 13, 2011, Oregon Writing Project at University of Oregon. Access Link

It was awesome to hear from the kids themselves how much they love digital storytelling, and it's clear how much they've learned from the process. Each child was excited, engaged, and seemed to enjoy sharing their new knowledge with the camera. It’s also just impressive that they learned audio and editing skills. I never had any projects like that in elementary or middle school, but I remember being curious about that kind of stuff due to shows like iCarly and the stop-motion videos I used to watch.

TEDx Talk. Emily Bailin, 2014, 17 min: The Power of Digital Storytelling

Emily Bailin’s Ted Talk was powerful, and that’s just the point. I can see the opportunity digital storytelling provides youth to express themselves, explore, share their own experiences and creations, and feel heard. Not only that, but stories are often captivating and effective ways to share information. As a teacher, applying digital storytelling in my lesson plans and the way I convey information might make learning more engaging for students.

Peppler, K. A. (2014). New creativity paradigms: arts learning in the digital age. Intro and Chapter 2.

This reading brought up some conflicting thoughts for me. I love interest-driven learning, but with recent research raising alarm bells about the effects of social media and screen time on youth’s cognitive development, I feel conflicted about how much we should use certain technologies in schools. If youth spend much of their free time on technology, should we increase screen time by introducing it in classrooms? I don’t have the answer, but I suspect it’s somewhere in the middle. It was very interesting to read about how new and developing technologies were viewed in the education sphere in the early 2000s and 2010s, when I was growing up.

[Video] Ableton. (2018, January 9). Katie Gately: How much can you feel?YouTube, 14 min. Access Link

Listening to Katie Gately talk about her music and creative process brought back many memories from my undergrad, when I experimented with soundscapes and acoustic ecology. I grew up learning classical music on the cello and singing in choir, and although I listened to many genres, this was the first time I heard music so experimental. It was exciting and freeing to learn about sound in such a new way. I really think incorporating sound exploration into teaching would be an amazing experience for kids, opening them up to the world of sound editing, potentially unfamiliar music, and simply the act of deeply listening to their surroundings. In Processes and Structures, Judy encourages us to experiment with and get to know both conventional and unconventional materials. Soundscapes feel like the sound version of that.