Digital Stories

Once upon a time, I had to help my brother make a digital story. My job was to hit the record button when he started talking into the mic and to hit the stop button when he was done. His story turned out pretty good too. He included images and text, and of course his voice over recordings. I was proud to be a part of it. Apart from my brief experience helping my brother, I have not had any experience with digital story telling. This has always been kind of sad to me because I have always thought of recording my video game play-throughs and tossing them up on YouTube.

Alas, I am not funny enough for that.

It scares me a bit that I do not have much experience with creating digital stories. I feel like it is important to include digital forms of learning in the classroom, and that is something that I will have to know as a teacher. This dawned on me as I was reading the article "Reimagining a Writer's Process" by Hicks, Turner, and Stratton. The authors say that "given this ever-shifting landscape of writing, many teachers enter classrooms without developing their skills as writers, and even fewer as digital writers who compose websites, slideshows, and other forms of multimedia" (168). I feel like up until now, it has been easy for me to avoid creating digital media. I've never had a reason to do so. But now... now I have a reason. If I do not know how to create digital media myself, how will I teach my students how to do so?

I feel like papers and digital stories are on completely different levels. Writing a paper is old news. It's stale, and let's be honest, the majority of students do not enjoy writing papers. Digital stories give students the opportunity to create something personal. They can include their own images and their own voices. They can use their own creative minds to create something that they care about. It gives them a reason to care about the project because it is their own living movie. Writing still comes into play when creating digital stories because there needs to be some kind of script, yet digital stories promote a sort of deeper thinking because there's more going on here as opposed to writing a paper. Every element of the story needs to work together to create and understandable and clear end product.

While I was browsing through the examples of the digital creations, I was thoroughly impressed. How will I ever be able to create something like that?! I loved the movie trailer about Goodnight Moon. I thought it was so well made, and I will admit that it fully scared me. I also thought the book trailer about Warriors Midnight was absolutely adorable. This trailer was made by a fourth grade students and he sounded so excited and passionate in his voice-overs. The memoir about the White Stag also really spoke to me. I could feel the emotion in the text and the pictures. Very well done.

Am I a good coach?

Without a doubt, I have always loved correcting writing. I loved making red marks there and there and there, and I loved commenting my thoughts. I thought that I always knew that I was talking about when I corrected the writing of others. I thought that I knew what I was doing.

Until I took a particular course on writing at UWM.

This course changed my look on revising and editing completely. When commenting, we weren't allowed to correct grammar or small mistakes. We could only comment on the ideas as a whole, on what the writer is trying to say. I had never corrected a paper like this before. I was lost. No longer did I feel like I was the shit at correcting papers. Through the stress and the heartbreak, I am forever grateful that I took that course, and that I learned how to comment on papers the correct way.

When looking at the batch of student papers that I have received so far, I must say that being a writing coach is more difficult than I expected. Some of the papers have been amazing, where I could barely think of a useful thing to suggest. Some have been less than great, where I don't even know where to start.

As a coach, I feel it's important that we almost overlook grammar mistakes and spelling errors when revising early on. I have encountered many of these, and I have not commented on a single one. These corrections can come later. As stated in "The Right to Write Badly", it is a natural step of the writing process to produce crappy writing. People need to write badly in first stages of drafting in order to produce something amazing later on. Instead of focusing on petty mistakes, I feel like commenting on the ideas of the paper are more important. Students need to learn how to develop their ideas, how to talk to their audience, and how to develop a proper thesis. I believe that by commenting on these things that I will be a more useful coach, rather than me commenting on grammar and spelling.

I watched Sugata Mitra's TED talk "Build a School in the Cloud". I found it interesting that the children didn't necessarily need a teacher to help their learning. They just needed the proper resources. These children taught themselves different languages and different facts just from playing on a computer. They did their own research to learn what they needed to learn. With that being said, I feel like anybody can learn anything. Students can be good writers if they have the proper tools to do so. I am not their teacher, no. But I am somebody who can guide them where they need it. I can ask the proper questions, and they can expand from there.

 As always, I love the site Purdue Owl. Not only does it have information on how to properly cite sources, it also has plenty on grammar.