2015 K-12 GLOBAL EDUCATION SYMPOSIUM FROM LOCAL TO GLOBAL: EXPLORING ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY William and Ida Friday Center, Chapel Hill, NC October 21, 2015

Exploring the Environment through Digital Storytelling

Today’s K-12 digital storytelling encompasses a range of tools, formats, and contexts for learning. At one time, digital storytelling was seen mostly as montages of images and videos set to music and narration. Although today’s classroom and school library applications still include this form, students, teachers, and school librarians can now use an array of approaches to tell digital stories, including via tweets, Vine videos, single-image stories, and “Draw My Life” whiteboard narratives. Through storytelling contexts from science content to poetry and self-reflection, digital storytelling fosters creativity, collaboration, digital literacy, and critical thinking, and aligns with cross-curricular learning objectives. In this session, participants will have the opportunity to practice some apps for integrating digital storytelling into environmental topics. Having a laptop, tablet, or smart phone is encouraged but not required.

Garnering millions of Youtube views, Draw My Life videos and their related conversations exemplify the participatory content creation and sharing that today’s learners seek out and enjoy. Draw My Life videos employ flip-book style videos or fast-motion video apps, typically on mobile devices, to capture narration and stick figure sketching of important life moments. With seemingly simple drawings, individuals use this forum to explore meaningful events, turning points, and lessons learned, in compelling, insightful, and sometimes very personal digital stories.

The purpose of this session is to introduce participants to the engaging and adaptable “Draw My Life” video as a form of storytelling. Further, attendees will identify and discuss the literacies that these stories require and foster, including technology and storytelling skills and dispositions of self-reflection and metacognition.

These are the notes from the ESLS Curriculum Discussion during ALA Midwinter, 2015.

Garnering millions of Youtube views, Draw My Life videos and their related conversations exemplify the participatory content creation and sharing that today’s learners seek out and enjoy. Draw My Life videos employ flip-book style videos or fast-motion video apps, typically on mobile devices, to capture narration and stick figure sketching of important life moments. With seemingly simple drawings, individuals use this forum to explore meaningful events, turning points, and lessons learned, in compelling, insightful, and sometimes very personal digital stories.

The purpose of this session is to introduce participants to the engaging and adaptable “Draw My Life” video as a form of storytelling. Further, attendees will identify and discuss the literacies that these stories require and foster, including technology and storytelling skills and dispositions of self-reflection and metacognition.