Summer Institute

July 16-20, 2012

What is a digital story and how are digital narratives effecting our understanding of literacy?  What does it mean to be a reader and what does it mean to be a writer in the digital age?  How can we teach our students kindergarten through university how to deconstruct and reconstruct digital texts and what can our students teach us?  In this one-week institute we will create digital stories using a variety of tools, most of them freely available.   We will then analyze the texts that we create from the perspective of reading, writing, and digital literacy.  Digital stories can be created and used in almost any classroom for the capture and analysis of such things as historical events, scientific observations, personal narratives, social phenomenon.    

This Summer Institute is a hands-on, minds-on workshop in designing, composing, editing, and publishing digital stories.  Participants will learn techniques of gathering and creating audio and visual content and using that content to construct digital stories or non-narrative essays. Participants will learn the skills of storyboarding and the seven elements of effective digital storytelling (point of view, dramatic question, emotional content, voice, soundtrack, economy, pace). This Institute is appropriate for teachers and members of other community organizations who want to learn and share the techniques of effective digital storytelling. Participants will produce a 5-10 minute digital story and either a short apologia or lesson plan for incorporating digital stories in the classroom.

Please keep in mind that this is a new institute and we are still working out the details.  An outline of topics can be found here.  

Please take the pre-institute survey!