Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

25 – Tools for Online Engagement and Communication
Digital stories as group projects
We can often depend on younger learners to develop
their own stories individually; with older learners, permitting
them to produce their story as a group project
allows them to draw on their collective resources and
promotes class cohesiveness, while increasing opportunities
for peer-to-peer learning to take place. A fortunate
byproduct of this is that it reduces the evaluation burden
on the classroom teacher. Rather than a load of 32 individual
projects to review and grade, groups of four reduce
that to a manageable eight projects.
Digital stories as an upward spiral
Conducting digital story productions over a longer period
of time with consecutive classes permits teachers to
select the best work from previous classes and present
them as exemplars for subsequent classes. In this way,
the bar is constantly raised, challenging students to
match and surpass the productions of the previous
year’s students.
CONCLUSION
We hope that we’ve given you some ideas to take storytelling
into your classrooms. A further source of inspiration
is in indigenous traditions of storytelling. For
example, in Japan, children are often the audience for
kami shibai, or paper theatre, where large pictures are
displayed as backgrounds while portions of the stories
are read. These are ideas and traditions of narratives that
can be tapped into to make digital storytelling a natural
and enjoyable part of your classes.
Chapter summary
“Teachers are expected to reach unattainable goals
with inadequate tools. The miracle is that at times
they accomplish this impossible task”. – Dr. Haim
G. Ginot (Ramsey, 2006, p. 96)
In this chapter, we have presented three tools that, while
technologically advanced, are still being perfected. Both
blogs and wikis are specific software applications, while
digital stories rely on a combination of software and
hardware. These tools will not do everything that you
need them to do, but that may be mainly because what
we need them to do changes so rapidly.
In reviewing this chapter, a profitable way to examine
it is to view the contents as a possible path that students
might take to negotiate an online learning environment.
Following the chapter on learner identity, we see learners
establishing online identities and then learning to
interact with other students, noting the problems and
possibilities as we introduce various activities, from responding
to and creating narratives in the form of storytelling,
to creating their own personal narratives
through the use of blogs. We also see learners beginning
to collaborate with other students to create repositories
of knowledge through wikis.
In all this, the educator stands as a guide on the side
rather than a sage on the stage, setting up appropriate
scaffolds to support learners, trying to minimize the
number of dead-ends that learners encounter, and
guiding them beyond those that they do. To do this, educators
have to embrace learners’ perspectives, in effect,
becoming learners themselves. In this sense, students, by
going through the process, teach teachers. In all of this,
learners and teachers alike ideally are all engaged in and
committed to building and continuously renewing
communities of practice, the subject of Chapter 30, Supporting
E-learning through Communities of Practice.
Before reading on, we urge you to spare a moment to
reflect on the speed at which our notions of online environments
change. For instance, in Beatty’s fairly recent
(2003) book on educational technologies for language
learning, technologies such as wikis and blogs, central
foci of this chapter, receive no mention. The coming
years will no doubt see the arrival of new technologies,
some of which may supplant those in use today. While
we forefront specific technologies in this chapter, we
hope that readers will continue to reflect on the underlying
themes of engagement, identity, narrative, communication,
cooperation, and collaboration, which
remain important whatever tools and techniques we
choose to use.
Resources
This is a list of resources for readers who wish to explore
further the topics in this chapter.
BLOGGING
Well-known blogging engines include WordPress and
TextPattern. WordPress MU is the multi-user version of
WordPress, used when you want to install the software
once and have several users, each with their own blog.
Drupal, although a more broad-based content management
system, is also good as a multi-user blogging engine.
Unless you have time and a certain amount of technical
expertise (or good tech support), we recommend free
hosted blogging services. There are several of these, but
Education for a Digital World 405