Chapter 2 Reflection

As I was reading Chapter 2, the same passage stood out, as the one Mike has used as his main quote:

"... science and math teachers, who I've found are typically less likely to make a connection between storytelling and classroom activities."

Jason B. Ohler. Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning, and Creativity (p. 26). Kindle Edition. 

That is very true of a typical science/math teacher. Very few of my science or math teachers made me write stories about what I learned. I was very strange when my 8th grade Physics teacher (yeah, in other parts of the world, Physics is introduced quite early) used essay assignments as part of assessment of our knowledge. What was even stranger - the feeling I got: I learned a lot more when I thought about the concepts and connections. I still liked the computational part of Physics (because I am a mathematician at heart) but the essays were very helpful. They were not creative writing type of essays, but it was still unheard of! Whoever makes their Physics students write essays?


I am a new teacher and do not have that much experience in this, but I have tried to make it a routine that one day a week, the warm up in my math class was a reflective kind - students would not do math that day but they would just write about their struggles/success/something interesting they realized, etc. At first, there was much resistance, but as the year progressed, the students liked their non-mathy warm up days.


As I was thinking about having my students do blogs about the process of their learning, reflecting on it, I was unsure about having it as a requirement that their posts have pictures. Then I stumbled upon this quote:

A note about still images in digital stories. Make sure students know the gamut of still images available to them so that they can make wise choices about image use. They come in many forms-charts, graphs, original drawings and photos, scanned objects, and so on-all of which have the capacity to be useful as well as distracting. 

Jason B. Ohler. Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning, and Creativity (p. 31). Kindle Edition. 

 This quote helped me decide: I will require them (in the future) to have a picture that is original and relates to their reflection on learning.It's possible, anyone, especially the digital natives, can do it.