Historical Narratives
A historical narrative is a short digital movie that explores some facet of history. It is typically 1-3 minutes in length, contains a montage of images, text or movies accompanied by a narration done in the students own voice.
Since much of our history occurred before the invention of movies and television, photographs, still images, and documents tend to make up the primary source resources available. Narrators may elect to add motion to these otherwise static images (i.e. the "Ken Burns effect").
These narratives typically follow a story structure, with a beginning, middle, and end, and provide an educational and entertaining experience for both creator and viewer alike.
The act of producing the narrative provides a strong active learning experience, where they must research the topic, actively make meaning from the primary documents available, craft a written story that conveys that understanding to others, and finally, create a movie that uses the documents to accompany the narration in a visually compelling manner.
Links:
Ken Burns PBS Civil War Digital Movie Site
Center for Digital Storytelling
Digital Storytelling Article - English Journal, January 2004
Since much of our history occurred before the invention of movies and television, photographs, still images, and documents tend to make up the primary source resources available. Narrators may elect to add motion to these otherwise static images (i.e. the "Ken Burns effect").
These narratives typically follow a story structure, with a beginning, middle, and end, and provide an educational and entertaining experience for both creator and viewer alike.
The act of producing the narrative provides a strong active learning experience, where they must research the topic, actively make meaning from the primary documents available, craft a written story that conveys that understanding to others, and finally, create a movie that uses the documents to accompany the narration in a visually compelling manner.
Links:
Ken Burns PBS Civil War Digital Movie Site
Center for Digital Storytelling
Digital Storytelling Article - English Journal, January 2004
posted by Bill Ferster at 2:36 PM
1 Comments:
I have been doing similar local history/primary source projects with middle school and high school students, without the technology. Have you folks looked into National History Day competitions? That would be an excellent way to showcase this technology. They have great expertise in scaffolding the instructional process of this kind of work, and an excellent national competition that gets the best out of kids.
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