Mr. Adams's Teaching Site

Digital Stories are student-created “videos” that communicate a personal or worldly theme. Typically constructed in iMovie, comprising of images (owned or borrowed), a digital story is a 21st Century twist on the age-old conventions of the narrative; it follows a plot structure, including a problem, process, solution, and resolution (a.k.a. “change”).

DST Elements

Title “Slide” with creator(s) name(s)

Still images arranged sequentially to illustrate a story

Background music (instrumental, no words)

Voice over that narrates the story

Resources slide with MLA citations for borrowed images, interviews, music, et cetera.

Example Plot

Problem	Process
I love to be creative. My favorite subject is art. I don’t love school and don’t want to be an art teacher, but I don’t know what kind of career to seek.	I considered just finishing high school and moving somewhere to just be an artist, but I am scared that I’ll have no money and I’ll get stuck in some low-paying job. I’ve never been interested in college, because I’ve never heard of a program that interested me.
Solution	Change
As I’ve been talking to my school counselors and art teachers, I’ve realized that there are a number of commercial art programs that I could look into. Some of them are two-year programs or co-op-style programs that include on-the-job internships between semesters of classroom and studio design study. I’m looking into these programs now, and I’ve narrowed down my search to just a few programs, all of which are located in cool places where I’d want to live.	I’m excited that I have an idea of what to do after high school, and it’s great that all the “As” I earned in my favorite classes are going to mean something on my applications. I’m going to art school.

Digital Storytelling Pages

• DST: Plan and Storyboard
• DST: Gather Images
• DST: Starting an iMovie Project
• DST: Adding Voice Over
• DST: Text Slides
• DST: Background Audio
• DST: Using Ken Burns Effect
• DST: Exporting and Embedding
• DST Rubric