RESEARCH, EXPERIENCE AND REFLECTION THROUGH DIGITAL STORIES Presented by: Emma Bless & Micol Hammack MERC, Spring 2012

What is Focused Inquiry?  VCU’s first year seminar-style course that teaches these fundamental skills:  Writing Reflection Narrative Analysis and synthesis Argument  Speaking  Research (information retrieval)  Quantitative Reasoning  Ethical Reasoning  Critical thinking

What is Focused Inquiry?  Shares many of the same objectives as K-12 but with some differences  Interdisciplinary  No SOLs

Reflecting and Arguing  Reflection on topic, learning, and self  Exploration  argument

The Assignment Your final project for Focused Inquiry is a digital story. A digital story is a video that combines still images with narrative and possibly music. Topic of digital story: Your digital story will be your reflection on your topic from Unit II, on the research you’ve done, and the answers or conclusions you’ve come to. You could think of it as telling the story of your journey through the process, a journey of knowledge and learning. How you organize and structure this digital story is entirely up to you, and creativity is encouraged.

The assignment, cont. Details: You should aim for your digital story to be approximately three minutes long and definitely no longer than six minutes. It is much better to plan and polish a focused story than to include too much. Generally, a three-minute digital story will have images and the script would be about 200 words long. You should use these figures as guidelines.

Goals of Assignment  Bring together research and (guided) reflection  Allow opportunity for creativity  Allow opportunity for polish (ELLs)  Explore what makes a narrative engaging  Create a useful, usable final product  Introduce students to a new medium

Assessment based on:  Quality of product (narration, sound quality, photo selection, transitions)  Quality of narrative (Was the story engaging, and interesting?)  Inclusion of personal and research  Fulfillment of assignment requirements (length, number of photos…)  + additional motivator: student votes

Examples 1. Justin 2. David 3. Emma

Programs used:  Photo Story ?displaylang=en&id=11132  iMovie

Adapting to pre-college level  Technology  In-class v. out-of-class

Thank you!  Micol Hammack   Emma Bless 