To prepare students for digital storytelling, it would be helpful to incorporate these and other lessons into a unit of study.
Feel free to modify, expand or eliminate any section of these lesson frameworks for your own curriculum, time frame and resources.
- Understand the history/importance of oral storytelling tradition (see Why Tell Stories and What is Digital Storytelling links on this website)
- Students will research (using web resources) storytelling traditions from a culture
- Students will find a story from another culture to read and present to the class
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- How to write a personal narrative story
- Using a koosh ball in circle format, students will introduce themselves to the class, first with only their name, then by naming favorite activity, then members of their family.
- Students will then write a narrative paragraph about themselves, using information they have shared
- Students will elaborate and shift into storytelling mode with personal narrative, using voice inflection, hand gestures and other techniques to expand upon the written work
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- How to use the Web to responsibly collect images, sounds, etc. (see List of Resources link on website)
- Use search engines to find some basic concepts (such as history of Internet)
- Explain about copyright protection (A hands-on activity: give students a piece of clay and have them make something artistic, and then have teacher take it away – explain this is like taking material from a website)
- Focus on Google and its ability to sort images, etc, and search for images
- Present websites that have images, music, etc, in the public domain and demonstrate how to download to desktop
- Practice downloading images onto the desktop
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- How to record their voice – pacing, inflection and tone
- Demonstrate use of microphone and computer recording software
- Read something very fast and very slow, and discuss differences
- Read something with no emotion and then with emotion, and discuss differences
- Have students read a paragraph of a story aloud, and record it
- Listen and evaluate the recording
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- How to use a digital camera and load images
- Demonstrate simple shooting of images using digital camera
- Load images into computer
- Store in files
- Practice accessing files and using them
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- How to storyboard a project (see Storyboard link on website)
- Using a handout with boxes, walk through a story frame by frame, with narration, image and picture in sync with each other
- Use colored sticky notes in first draft to allow for easy manipulation of story ideas
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- How to use MovieMaker software (see Creating a Digital Story link on website)
- Demonstrate with example how a digital story might look
- Present step-by-step exercise, using clip art and music files
- Import images from digital camera and experiment with pacing of files
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