05 Apr Digital Storytelling with Online and Mobile Apps
Sometimes the flavor du jour is so up your alley, you feel as if the stars are aligned in your favor. Digital storytelling is my salted caramel – I’m excited that it’s currently en vogue, but the topic is profoundly satisfying to the point that I’m invested regardless of its cool factor. Though my forays in the field have been largely focused on second language acquisition, I’ve had conversations with colleagues lately that highlight the interdisciplinary nature of digital storytelling. It could serve as the linkage between creative writing and rhetoric, the foundation upon which communication and theater work might be built, or the perfect marriage of fine art and the creative word. Not to mention the fact that my side life as a voracious food blogger has a home under the digital storytelling umbrella – each recipe posted is the documentation of a moment in my culinary journey, enlivened by photos of the process, the completed dish, and annotations on technique, ingredients and sometimes food history. For me, digital storytelling is a cozy nest for those that love to create, regardless of the medium or discipline to be covered.
My brilliant colleague, Silvina Orsatti, and I spent some time curating a humble collection of our favorite digital storytelling apps for PC/Mac, iOS and Android. We structured our teaching lab for the 2014 Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages around the World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages and the 21st Century Student Outcomes, and built out the presentation in Blendspace so that we could combine traditional slides with embedded views of the apps and websites. The rich dialogue sparked by the participants was the most perfect evidence of the flexibility of digital storytelling, and I have to say that I left with a full rolodex of potential assignments to share with my instructors back at NOVA.
You can browse through the presentation below, or pull it up in its own window at http://blnds.co/1igV1m2. And since it is in Blendspace, you can leave comments on it as well. Feel free to share how you plan to or are currently integrating digital storytelling into your curriculum. We’ll all benefit from learning more about the 31 flavors out there 😉
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