Digital storytelling/poetry

So many ways to use digital storytelling! Just today, I was meeting with a co-worker who teaches the same groups of students that I have, simply brainstorming what we could do with them next week when we have an unusual day of block scheduling. She has the luxury of having 15 computers in her classroom (one of the perks of being the yearbook advisor), and we were toying with the idea of having them read further in the novel (Touching Spirit Bear) that they are reading for my class, and then using her computers to create a digital representation of what is happening at key moments of the plot. They would have to record themselves reading a passage, then go onto Flickr and find images that would fit with the passage, and combine the two with careful editing to create a movie.

I also like the idea of creating digital poems, or using images to bring to life poems already written about a certain topic. For my "movie" this week, I'd like to use pictures I've taken with my boyfriend and his daughter as we've done "fun fall" activities together recently. For example, last weekend we went to a Halloween parade, carved pumpkins, and cooked the pumpkin seeds. So to keep things simple, I found a few poems about Halloween traditions and thought that I could combine our experiences with generic poems, thus giving those poems more personal meaning.

I can see using this same idea in the classroom to give students the opportunity to bring their own writing "to life," asking them to connect their writing to related images. As always, I will have to allow time for the students to learn the technologies, as I know that a lot of my students will be using tools such as Flickr, MovieMaker, and Audacity for the first time (even if they are supposed to be "digital natives").