This week in INTE5340 – Digital Storytelling, we focused on finding voice. This was one of my favorite topics, as I’ve always appreciated hearing one’s personal story and their journey of how they got to a certain place in life. I’ve also had a strong interest in finding ways to help people find their voice. Luckily, we are moving into an age where there are many tools for one to do this in diverse ways.

We had been assigned an article to read and annotate by Monica Nilsson titled “Developing Voice in Digital Storytelling Through Creativity, Narrative and Multimodality” (2010). This was exactly the kind of article I was hoping to read for this topic. While I don’t teach in any capacity, I have an interest in how younger students have more access to becoming digital storytellers. We have had these opportunities in higher education, but I find it to be very important that young students become exposed to this technology early on in their educational career. I did some research on my own this week and discovered a few articles of interest to support our topic this week that I want to share in case anyone is also interested in digital storytelling among younger students.

The Power of Digital Storytelling to Support Teaching and Learning

Bernard R. Robin (2016), Digital Education

The Effectiveness of Digital Storytelling in the Classrooms: A Comprehensive Study
Smeda et. al. (2014), Smart Learning Environments

For my DS106 Daily Create assignments, I completed #TDC2006. This TDC asked to take a photo of something familiar from a new perspective. I visited my 92-year-old grandmother this week and was completely shocked to see a pineapple growing in a pot inside her house. I knew she had planted the top of a store-bought pineapple in this pot a couple of years ago, and it had grown into a very large plant, but I was not prepared to see an actual pineapple. My grandma has an amazing green thumb and has been known throughout her life for her gardening skills, but I was pretty shocked by this. In this TDC, the new perspective I was aiming for was that I am used to seeing pineapple sold in the produce section of the grocery store, but not inside a house in a container.

For my two assignments this week, I created a Pictogram Pictionary and a StoryMap. My Pictogram Pictionary was to depect the upcoming solar eclipse in August. I live in what is known as the “Path of Totality”, meaning the solar eclipse is going to make it dark outside at 10:00 a.m. As a result, my region has been identified as a place that is scheduled to receive millions of visitors. Emergency managers are warning residents that due to the influx of people and the strain in multiple systems, we could undergo a gasoline shortage, grocery shortage, power outages, and gridlocked traffic. This topic is on the forefront of the news here, so naturally my mind went to doing something about the eclipse for my Pictogram Pictionary. For this assignment, I used PowerPoint to create slides of the pictograms that I later saved as JPGs. I went to YouTube and used their Slideshow feature to create the slideshow, then set the timer and transitions.

For my second assignment, I created a StoryMap about my family’s immigration to the United States from Norway. I have been into my geneology for years, but it’s been a solitary activity for the most part. I loved being able to share something publically using the data I’ve compiled, and to also honor my family in some way. Our heritage is extremely important to us and this was the first assignment I’ve done so far that really felt personal to me, so I was grateful for this opportunity. To complete this assignment, I used StoryMap, family history notes, family photos, newspaper archives, and data I have compiled over the past 10+ years on Ancestry.com.

For my case study this week, I critiqued the 18 in the Bay project. Please read my blog post here for more in depth details about my experience with this.