Article Assessment #1: Ohler, Digital Storytelling in the Classroom, Chapters 5 & 6

Overview

Chapters 5 and 6 of Digital Storytelling in the Classroom by Jason Ohler describes an approach to digital storytelling that helps storytellers create compelling stories. The goal is to create digital stories that demonstrate growth in characters, and avoid episodic stories that are simply a series of loosely-related events. These chapters discuss the story core, story maps, and briefly mention story boards. Story cores describe the central challenge that poses a problem for the main character, the tension and transformation that the challenge brings about, and a resolution to the challenge. The story map ensures that the story has emotional significance by mapping out the rising tension, struggle, and resolution that the main character goes through. The storyboard lays out the events and scenes in the story, along with technical notes to carry out the media work effectively.

Reference Points

• There are no formulas or rules in effective storytelling, only guidelines.
• Without a meaningful, significant problem or challenge to overcome, a story can rarely be compelling.
• The story core must be compelling before students begin doing media work; before they begin recording, compiling clips, and editing.
• Thinking in story core terms can help make school board and community presentations significantly more compelling. "What transformation do they [the school board, members of the community] need to undergo?"
• Many digital story rubrics make the mistake of being entirely technical. Thinking in story core terms, and basing rubrics on story map concepts, can avoid this problem.
• Requiring only a storyboard can produce technically proficient, but emotionally empty digital stories.
• The strongest stories bring about lasting changes in the audience as well as in the central characters of the story.

Reflection

While reading these chapters, it was easy to recognize how I and my students will create more compelling digital stories through the use of story maps. I have seen many projects in school that have little significance because they are episodic and lack tension or a central challenge. This even explains why some science and math writeups lack impact. If students focus clearly on the problem to which they are applying science and math concepts, we develop interest in their work. When there is no compelling problem to solve or challenge to resolve, we just see a bunch of operations or a bunch of facts or investigative steps. I look forward to applying the concepts of the story map to different kinds of content-focused work, and to a variety formats such as lab writeups and math investigations, as well as digital stories.

I also particularly like the emphasis on the universal application of story maps. Ohler makes the point that many school board and community presentations would be significantly stronger if the presentation were mapped out to include a strong challenge, period of tension, and resolution. I have been intending to make a presentation to our school board about our computer refurbishing project. If I had done that presentation before this reading, I would have made an interesting but fairly dry presentation about what we are doing. This reading makes me realize I need to focus as much on showing why we are doing the project, not just telling the board why we are doing it and assuming the significance of the problem is understood by everyone. I believe my final digital story, which will be presented at the April school board meeting, will do this well.