Digital stories by future teachers

I am blown away by the variety of topics and approaches represented in the following sample of digital stories created in summer 2010 by future teachers in the teacher education program at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville College of Education Health and Human Sciences.

We use Apple's iMovie and encourage our students to consider future educational contexts as they narrow down a topic and potential target audience for their digital stories.  We also talk about copyright and fair use issues and guide students toward locating copyright-friendly media (music, graphics, video) from the Public Domain or Creative Commons.  I recommend students use original media (photos, illustration, voiceover narration) whenever possible.

The final iMovies are exported as QuickTime files and embedded in the preservice teachers' blogs.  

My hope is that each preservice teacher will find himself or herself in a future classroom setting where they can use their artifacts to instruct or simply to inspire, scaffolding young people in the creation of their own digital stories someday.

Enjoy!  And if possible leave a comment or some feedback for these novice filmmakers when you visit their blogs!

• Chicago: A Poem  Brooke used audio to record the poem and photos to represent.
• Life in 2 Worlds  Leah grew up in Tennessee and Vietnam.
• Geometry and Architecture  Kathleen is a math education person -- found images of buildings made from legos.
• How to tie your shoes  Katie did a "how to" video on tying shoes.  She used words and audio to enhance the message, once slow then fast.
• Time for Revolution  Joey combined his two passions: hard rock music and American history.
• Understanding Different Forms of Protest  Janna will be certified to teach the deaf and hard of hearing.  She included audio for her students who are partially hearing, but her main objective was to juxtapose signing with the English language lyrics from a popular 60s protest song, which appear in subtitles.  I think she did it!
• A Separate Peace  Justin hopes to teach the John Knowles classic when he enters the classroom as a high school English teacher.  He created this digital story to capture the essence of the novel.
• How to Make Pasta  Ashlee created this artifact with her future special education students in mind.
• Study Habits  Elizabeth was inspired by the Plain English videos.

Digital stories by future teachers