SMI 2010 Project 2 – Personal Narrative

Students create a 1-4 minute media project that presents a dream or memory.  They write the script and record the narration.  This serves (or can anyway) as the primary mode of storytelling for the project.  The project is designed to emphasis the personal aspect of storytelling, that we each have many stories to tell and to expore various ways of telling story.  Students are able to use the narration, still images, video clips, sounds, music and present them any way they would like. They are encouraged to use a variety of media to accomplish the task.

The project guidelines can be  interpreted quite differently, allowing students a wide range of creativity.  Some students are quite literal with dream that they had while others present a dream or hope for the future.  Still others wrote a dreamlike story.  The project ideas were very creative and I believe that providing the digital story-like structure enabled the students to focus on the storytelling rather than the story itself.

Jason Ohler writes a comprehensive book on digital stories that encompasses the concept, structure, methodology and relationship to the world of education.  We took inspiration from these theories to create our personal narrative projects.