Expanding Literacy

Storytelling is humanity’s most universal form of communication. It is also one of the hardest to master effectively. But there are powerful opportunities for students to command this vital form through digital storytelling, which offers new and deeply relevant pathways to communicate effectively and purposefully using text, sound, music, and imagery––still and moving. How can we make meaningful, thoughtful digital storytelling a standard, best practice in schools? Brett Pierce takes you on an journey into the deeply engaging world of digital story creation, providing a new outlook for why Digital Storytelling is critically important and how to integrate these processes seamlessly in the classroom. Expanding Literacy offers a specific project-based learning angle that can be meshed with any traditional and non-traditional curricular topic and is flexible enough to be applied to almost any content area. It’s an approach to learning that focuses simultaneously on deep curricular learning and a range of digital and human skills, all within the expansive realm of digital multimodal literacy. We all live in a visually-driven, technological world. In digital storytelling, the written word is an integral part of this visual world, but its role is re-cast in coordination with the creatively robust properties of sound, music, and imagery. The resulting narrative experience is impactful. Prepare students for most anything that the world may throw at them and teach them how to communicate effectively inside of the digital universe that envelopes them, now and in the future.