"Make Me a Story" chapter 5

This chapter was really short, but had two really important takeaways for me. The whole of the chapter centered on assessment and making sure that student's storytelling projects are aligned with standards.

With regards to standards, Miller provides several examples of how digital storytelling aligns with standards from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) as well as the International Reading Association. But she goes even further to say that "it's important to realize that digital storytelling involves skills that some educational standards suggest students should master. It's not just an extra added on without connection to the curriculum" (Miller 80). While New Mexico has adopted CCSS as it's state standards instead of the other two standards mentioned above, I'm sure it would be just as easy to take a digital storytelling lesson/unit and demonstrate how it meets several of the CCSS standards for Language Arts for any grade level.

The other important point that this chapter emphasizes is that digital storytelling offers students the chance to show real learning and growth. It's should not be looked at as "a waste of time" or just something pretty that students are doing on computers. Miller explains it better than I can with this quote: "It's easy to demonstrate that students are doing much more than simply creating pretty slide shows when they're working on digital stories. They're practicing important skills and learning to think in meaningful way about the process of writing and using technology to put the different elements of a story together" (Miller 84). She then talks about the opportunity for students to create a rubric for this assignment, should the teacher choose to use one for grading and assessment. Personally, I don't like rubrics. As a student, they don't offer me anything helpful and often just encourage me to write my paper to fit the rubric, rather than the other way around. As an upcoming teacher, I don't want my students to get stuck in that same trap. Additionally, as objective as rubrics try to be, there is always an element of subjectivity involved in creating the criteria for a rubric.
Having said all that, I understand that rubrics will work better for some classes and students than others. If I were going to use a rubric, I would definitely follow Miller's example and allow my students the chance to contribute to the criteria, if not to set it up entirely based on what they think an outstanding assignment would look like.

That's it for this book! A pretty short read, and not quite what I was expecting, but definitely some helpful tips on how to successfully incorporate digital elements in to the processes of writing.