Chapter 4 Reflection, Assessing Digital Stories

In chapter four of Ohler’s book, he touched on one of the trickiest concepts in digital storytelling, related to the assessment piece of it. I found this statement, “Without a practical, meaningful way to assess new media, teachers are understandably reluctant to include it in the curriculum,” (Ohler, 2008, p. 63), to be one of the most important related to why more teachers and schools aren’t actually using DST on a more regular basis. He is absolutely correct in saying that if teachers don’t feel that they have the ability to easily assess and understand what the students are creating, they will simply shy away from it altogether. We see this right now just with the use of any technology, even if it isn’t something as new as the digital storytelling pieces.

For my group’s professional development plan, we specifically decided to focus on providing some basic technology skills for educators that seem to have a fear of anything related to technology. Most everyone can think of a teacher like this, possibly one who has been teaching for 30 years and didn’t want to embrace the changes with computers in the schools. Or perhaps it is someone who just didn’t have a chance to learn about what resources are available because the schools didn’t offer it, and now they just don’t know what to do to catch up. For these teachers who lack even the basic technology skills, something like DST must be so overwhelming and daunting to even think about. However, I feel that Ohler did a good job of giving some basic ideas about how to look at digital story pieces and begin to correlate the assessments with what we already are doing in writing today. Once those techno-phobic teachers can see how the skills are truly all interrelated, perhaps they will at least venture into the beginning stages of just thinking about using DST in their classrooms. While it will take a lot of the innovative teachers to help move them past that thinking stage into the doing stage, I think if we can all at least try, the students will be the ones to ultimately benefit in the end.