Digital Stories in Math?

As I have worked my way through the Educational Technology program at UCF, several of our courses have focused on various type of Digital Storytelling. We have covered Me Story, Digital Booktalk, and Change Story while exploring effective technological techniques and processes to create quality products. While developing our products, we learned the valuable learning experiences and achievement benefits students gain by researching, creating, and presenting their digital stories and evaluating the stories created by their peers. For me, however, as a math teacher, I understood the value of Digital Storytelling in terms of improving literacy, but had been (until recently) skeptical about seeing such results with mathematical content. However, after extensively researching the topic, I found evidence that story could possible prove equally effective in a mathematics class; not just the language arts.

The beauty of storytelling is the fact that most find high levels of familiarity in telling a story; it is the way we talk, interact, and often relay information. How this can be applied a mathematical sense is integrating a story (maybe a personal experience) with a real-world high school mathematical problem or concept. In my classes, I envision my students correlating elements of story with a real-world mathematical concept to create a Digital Story. Their end product should tell a story while applying mathematics to a real-world problem while containing instructional value by providing a solution to the problem. Difficult? Maybe, but not impossible. 

The biggest obstacle to overcome will not likely be the math concepts, but the creation of the digital story. My students, while in the process of learning, are not as proficient in the media creating area, as we will need. With that being said, I would incorporate progress checkpoints for key pieces of the final project. These checkpoints would include a developed story (with correlated real-world mathematics connection), a storyboard, the associated audio piece, and a complete rough draft before the final submission. Of course, each element would be evaluated for accuracy and content using a predetermined rubric.

Keeping in mind the technology levels of my students, I would plan to have a sub-lesson for each section of the project prior to the checkpoint. The lesson must begin with some sort of explanation as to why we’re doing this. (Not my favorite question to be asked, but important to answer nonetheless.) This article gives a quick and easy explanation as to the value of using Digital Storytelling in the classroom to reach students in the YouTube Generation. To ensure a high quality product, in addition to teaching content, each piece of the Digital Story would have a lesson involved to thoroughly explain its importance in the overall process. I would include suggestions on appropriate tools to use for each portion, examples of high-quality products in addition to self-generated “How-to” tutorials of me using my preferred creation tools. While I would encourage my students to use the tools I suggested, there is value in having them search for their own tools, applications, and sites to support them in their process. Websites like Go2web20, Discover Education, and Cool Tools for Schools offer NUMEROUS links to Web 2.0 tools that will support them in each step of the creation process, and often have instructions or tutorial on how to easily and effectively use their site.