Article 5 Opus in the Classroom: Striking CoRDS With Content-Related Digital

Summary
Storytelling is a documented part of every culture and Teshia Young Roby, of Cal. State Polytechnic, describes the benefits of using digital story telling in the classroom in her article "Opus in the Classroom". Roby begins by explaining how digital story telling is engaging for students while enhancing their literacy skills by students clarifying their thinking and making personal connections to the story content. The literacy skills are not the only gains, students create self-acceptance by capturing their life and home cultural experiences to share. This new identity helps students not only understand themselves but discover similarities and differences of culture between them and peers through association of experiences. These new understandings give digital stories the power to not only create community but to raise awareness towards, perspective, and empathy towards need for social change.
For teachers digital story telling can be a vital part of pedagogical decisions and professional development. Teachers will make lasting authentic associations with their students home lives and classroom if story telling is seen as valuable to the curriculum. These associations result in teachers making informed, compassionate changes to their teaching based on their new understanding of students lives and the community they serve. In addition to making changes to teaching, the digital stories can be used by teachers in the future to introduce or supplement content to make community connections.
Roby also describes how digital story telling is a genuine exchange of ideas and couples teaching with the national standards in technology. The stories synthesize content, story telling, and digital media understanding by creating an enhanced reusable projects with images, sound, and video.

Review
I agree that the use of digital story telling would be a useful tool in creating a community of learners that are aware of the cultural differences and similarities they bring to a unique classroom environment. But I also see the potential use in other content areas as well, for instance in the primary grades making a digital story of a butterflies life cycle using journal observations as content or having foreign language students create stories of a virtual tour of a city highlighting the points of interest as a guide for peers.
I believe that the digital stories would keep students highly engaged and serve as wonderful tools for assessing the direction of instruction. That being said, the amount of time needed and availability of digital media to produce such stories may make implementing the use of them in the classroom difficult without extensive planning. I do not believe that it would be a feasible project to be done repeatedly and would worry about the loss of digital skills due to lack of use.

Roby, T. (2010). Opus in the classroom: Striking CoRDS with content-related digital storytelling. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 10(1). Retrieved from http://www.citejournal.org/vol10/iss1/currentpractice/article1.cfm