This week I created a digital story for my EDTECH 513 class. We have been exploring a phenomenon called the Personalization Principle, which embodies the idea that e-learners will better embrace e-materials if they feel some kind of attachment to the materials and/or the author(s) that produced the materials. In that vein, we were asked to produce a short digital story to add some color to our teaching and digital classrooms.
I decided to tell the story behind a poem I wrote in the winter of 2006. I was visiting my children in the Sultanate of Oman at the time. They lived there with their mother who was a teacher at one of Muscat's (the capital of Oman) international schools. I visited them two to three times per year, and on one of my visits, we went down to the beach. As the kids and I played in the sea, an Omani family of five approached us. I was quickly abandoned for the three Omani kids, and I struck up a conversation with the father of the family. The poem I read is about my reflections of our conversation.
Digital stories are a quick and efficient way to add local color to our teaching materials. If we are in an e-learning situation, digital stories are a great way to let our personalities some through. By having students produce digital stories, we can also get a stronger sense of their personalities. Digital stories are also a great way to differentiate our assessments by giving students an opportunity to demonstrate their learning in a non-traditional format.
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