LearningTimes Green Room

Susan and Dan are joined by Stacy Behmer who shares her experience with digital storytelling (DST) in elementary and middle school classrooms.



Download MP3 File

Show notes:

Stacy Behmer joins Susan and Dan to talk about her experience with digital storytelling (DST) in elementary and middle school classrooms. Stacy researched DST as a graduate student at Iowa State University and has made her resources available at http://ctlt.iastate.edu/~ds/Behmer/. Throughout this interview, Stacy references Jane Schmidt, a middle school English teacher in Maquoketa, Iowa, as well as her major professor Dr. Denise Schmidt. Both women were instrumental in advising Stacy through her research.

Defining DST: combining story + music, audio, video, photos and other media.

Stacy’s research was with 7th grade language arts students. She walks through how she became acquainted with DST and how she saw the connections to teaching/learning and standards.

The end product of her research were stories created by groups of 3-4 students on the theme “Everyone has a story to tell and we’re going to help you to tell it.” These stories came from interviews of community members; the project extended over a four week period. Stacy shares all the details of how she implemented this.

A couple insights/questions to listen for:

• What happens when a group doesn’t follow the prescribed steps?
• The importance of flexibility
• How kids latch on the technology
• Mac/PC alternatives iMovie versus MovieMaker versus PhotoStory3
• Connecting your project to standards (think language arts)

What would she change? Building in assessment measures throughout the project.

Can this transfer to higher education classrooms where faculty do not have students every day for large chunks of time? Stacy tells about pre-service teachers and their DSTs.

Stacy’s biggest surprise was the level of engagement.

Again, go look at Stacy’s website at http://ctlt.iastate.edu/~ds/Behmer/ and see the stories!

Listeners, Susan and Dan want to hear your stories about DST projects you’ve tried and how they’re working!

You can respond using the “Comments” link below or talk to us in LearningTimes. Or call us at 1-800-609-9006 x8055 (US and Canada) or 678-255-2174 x8055 (outside US and Canada). Join us!

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 18th, 2007 at 11:02 pm and is filed under Episodes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.