2014 VSTE Annual Conference

The National Council for Teachers of English 2005 Position Statement on Multimodal Literacies encourages instructors to assist today's tech savvy scholars, "particularly adept at recognizing creative applications for new technologies," to consider the implications of their digital works. Our digital natives are comfortable in composing in digital spaces; limitless options exist for them to communicate with friends, family, and mass audiences for social, personal, educational, or entertainment purposes. Yet few realize these same multimodal compositions - whether Instagram and Snapchat images and collages, YouTube videos, Twitter feeds, and Pinterest pages - could serve as a springboard from textual or visual narration to in-depth scholarly research. Indeed, many students focus their attention daily on issues of importance to their lives yet struggle to generate unique research topics and perspectives. In this presentation, we will review a digital storytelling assignment for a first-year composition course at Tidewater Community College, analyze how it goes beyond narration to promote inquiry, research, and engagement of multimodal sources, and promote the flexibility of the digital assignment across the curriculum in secondary and post-secondary classrooms. We will discuss the assignment design, the affordances and limitations of various Web tools and software in the production and execution of projects, and the criteria for assessment of multimodal digital compositions. The significance of digital and research competencies for 21st century scholars will be highlighted as the assignment encourages creative choices by students to select the digital tools that best suit them (e.g. Prezi, iMovie, Camtasia Studio, PowToon, Audacity, Tumblr). Participants will view hybrid projects created by students with a wide array of skills in video editing, slideshow presentations, and collage narratives; various tools will also be examined. We will engage participants by asking them to share their experiences and discuss the various pedagogical benefits and limitations of digital storytelling.