Digital Storytelling in Teaching & Learning

Our esteemed UAH colleague Dr. Laurel Bollinger contributed this week's resource for faculty interested in folding (digital) storytelling into their curriculum. Storytelling is as old as humankind, no doubt, and storytelling for instruction as old as instruction itself. It's not a new idea to incorporate storytelling into curriculum, but digital storytelling is a fairly new phenomenon with ever-changing toolsets and resources, as well as applications for both formal and informal educational experiences. And it's not hard to accomplish!

The University of Houston offers public access to web resources devoted to supporting digital storytelling both as a means of instruction as well as a tool for learning assessment.

And if that's not enough to whet your appetite, check out the 30 Sites and Apps for Digital Storytelling!

For support with integrating storytelling into your teaching and learning, please visit ETL or email Tess.Olten@uah.edu.

Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash

Screencast-o-Matic on a Surface Pro

This should have special meaning for those in math, science, and engineering who have been frustrated by the keyboard limitations of various types of academic technologies and wish for a smooth surface upon which to write complex formulas and diagrams while recording lecture video!

Interested in learning how to create high quality video right on your desktop, laptop, iPad, or Surface? Contact Tess.Olten@uah.edu for more information and to get started!

Inspiring Engagement

Click the graphic above for the full story!

What the World Needs from Education (Medium/OL Weekly)

From my beloved OL Weekly by e-learning guru Stephen Downes:

Marc Prensky knows how to make a big statement. Here's his latest: "People, In the future, will increasingly mean newly empowered symbiotic human hybrids who can, as individuals and teams, apply the strength of their unique blends of human and technology components to creating new and positive value and solutions to local and global problems. 

“The big issue for the world is not to create more or new jobs, but to figure out effective ways for people to be compensated for whatever series of world-improving projects they want and choose to do.” 

Can't say I disagree with him. 

See also: The No-Collar Workforce, Deloitte.

What the World Needs from Education is a little deeper dive than usual blog fare, but it's worth the time. It provides a framework for moving forward through the technological evolution and its pedagogical impact on teaching and learning, but also the world beyond degree attainment. This piece forces us to reevaluate our objectives for ourselves and for our learners.

Symbiosis with technology — i.e. tools becoming indispensable parts of us — is, of course, the story of human development. The question of what we keep in our human heads (i.e. our dreams, passions, compassion, warmth, kindness, good, ethical behavior) and what we delegate to our extensions (e.g. calculation, memory, speed, accuracy, analysis, connection) has been a human issue since the invention of the abacus and writing. Today this integration is speeding up incredibly. 

Finding new evolving integration opportunities — and realizing them seamlessly — is perhaps the most crucial task for humans in the coming years and centuries. It is what will lead to the solutions of all our pressing problems, which neither technology alone, nor humans unintegrated with it, will be able to fully deal with. Helping each individual find his or her unique, appropriate and ideal “style” of hybrid symbiosis is perhaps the central challenge of future education. And yet, no one has adequately addressed the issue in those terms.