Assignment Spotlight: Digital Story

The assignment spotlight that I'd like to highlight in this blog post comes from the K, Patricia cross Academy. This is a really great resource that shares lots of fantastic teaching strategies that you might use in an online or face to face class. This particular teaching technique is one where you ask students to create a digital story that can also be an audio or most likely a video story.

While this digital story is not one specific assignment, you can use this technique for lots of different types of assignments. For instance, one semester, I had students create a digital story as a very low stakes VoiceThread assignment. We were talking about cultural practices and I asked students to select one cultural practice from their own personal cultural background and to share a picture that represents the practice. Once in Voice Thread, students can record a comment describing the practice and why they picked this practice to share.

This proved to be a really fun and engaging activity for students. They shared pictures of Christmas trees, and even their own personal family Christmas photos to describe their cultural practice of celebrating the holiday. I saw pictures of baptisms, families coming together to celebrate Thanksgiving and other celebrations that included food, families dressed in different cultural garments and students describing how important these practices were to them and their families.

Another type of digital story that I've done with students was for students to create a digital newsletter. For this activity, I used a software called Smore, a digital newsletter tool. I assigned my students to create a digital newsletter focused on the topics we had discussed throughout the semester. This was a final class project so students had all the information and materials we worked on throughout the semester to contribute to the assignment. I also included lots of tutorials and informational packets to students to teach them about how to use the tool and provided them with many opportunities to ask questions. These types of digital story assignments, really highlighted the students' creativity and also tapped into their personalities. Helping them to share parts of their personal ideas and thoughts was both a fun and insightful project that I look forward to repeating.

If you're thinking about implementing a digital story into your online course, one recommendation I would make is to start with something very low stakes. For instance, you might do something like a VoiceThread assignment where students just have to upload a picture and then talk about the picture. As you become more familiar with different Ed Tech tools, you can work your way up to a digital story as a final project. Be sure to provide students with lots of support, in terms of tutorials and information on how to use the tool effectively. You may also want to scaffold this assignment throughout the semester so that students have to work on certain parts at different points during the semester.

I hope that you have fun exploring this new assignment and I'd love to hear your ideas about implementing it into your own online course. Share your thoughts, experiences and ideas in The Online Educator Facebook Group and as a treat don’t forget to GRAB YOUR FREE GUIDE to the 3 Secrets to Teaching Online Successfully.