Enjoyed working with a great group of faculty producing digital stories that share their teaching philosophies. Thanks to Cheryl Bacon for proposing the prompt and working with Al Haley and Kyle Dickson in the Learning Studio to lead a great workshop.
Thanks to the participants for sharing their work.
The week after finals, the Learning Studio will be hosting a 3-day digital storytelling workshop that provides faculty a chance to learn about media creation and work with colleagues and media specialists to develop an original digital story.
This workshop is perfect for anyone wanting to share their teaching vision in an upcoming teaching portfolio or considering a media project in a course in the fall. This May we’ll tell stories around “Why I Teach.”
Our lives have been shaped by great teachers. So much of the way we look at the world as parents, as men and women of faith, and as teachers ourselves is the product of those who modeled a unique vision for us. As we talk to our students and colleagues about who we are as teachers today, an important first step is learning to share our story.
This spring we were honored to work with Dr. Laura Carroll, associate professor of English, as our Faculty Media Fellow.
Dr. Carroll spent the fall semester in Oxford, England, as part of her second semester with the ACU Study Abroad program. While there, she also had an opportunity to continue work in a research area looking at the rhetoric of monuments and memorials, specifically focused on the remembrance of the Holocaust.
After returning to Abilene, she spent the spring semester working with Learning Studio staff and graduate media fellow Erin Daugherty on a scholarly storytelling project to share the implications of her research with new audiences.
Special thanks to Laura and Erin and to Mathew Bardwell in the Learning Studio for their contributions to this first faculty fellows project.
Again this spring we worked with students at ACU’s campus in Leipzig, Germany, as well as with on-site faculty Derek and Rachel Brown to take digital storytelling overseas. Students spent two days in workshops developing scripts, recording audio, and editing stories on iPads or laptops.
This group of students as well as the Oxford group were also incredibly generous in showing us around their host cities as we collected footage for a Study Abroad film we’ll release this summer.
Last fall we had a chance to work with a number of students from the Honors College taking HON 401: Short Film Production. Wanted to make sure we took the opportunity to share the remarkable work, produced in teams within a short 5-week semester. They tackled technical challenges using LS checkout equipment, many of them for the first time. At the same time they kept their eye on the the shape of compelling stories. Really proud of their work.
This spring the Learning Studio worked with Dr. Houston Heflin as part of our first digital storytelling project overseas. We worked with Houston and his students before they left the States to begin thinking about media projects they would complete mid-way through the semester and then at the end, reflecting on their own experiences in East Germany.
It was also our first storytelling workshop entirely on the iPad. Students had access to a couple Blue Snowball USB microphones (that perplexed TSA officials going and coming) and all the photos and video they had taken while traveling. We had strong scripts in an intensive three-day timespan for their first project in April. Then each student reflected on their overall experience abroad in a final project in May. Here are a few examples of their work.
Digital Storytelling workshop