Digital Storytelling: Synthesizing My Multimodal Journey with #WalkMyWorld 2016

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. – Maya Angelou

WEEK NINE: Collect and curate how you used different modes (i.e., images, text, video, and audio content) to reflect on your past, present, and future identities. This week, #WalkMyWorld invites you to produce a digital story that synthesizes your journey over the past eight learning events.

Digital storytelling weaves multiple media sources into a compelling narrative that moves beyond stating a sequence of events by inviting the audience to think about what they believe and challenges them to consider a different point of view. When you have time, watch Emily Bailin's 17 minute TED talk as she explains her research with the power of digital storytelling.


Notice how Emily Bailin starts with a question,"Where am I from?," and then applies the inquiry process to examine her life's journey as an educator, until the finished digital story has a captivating beginning, a compelling middle, and a convincing end. Using the same mentor poem, Where I’m From, by George Ella Lyon, I synthesize my digital story using three different mediums. How does your engagement with my story change when you engage through different mediums:
1. I used Storify to collect and curate a few tweets from each learning event, click HERE.
2. I used Google Docs, to write my poem using words, click HERE.
3. I used Animoto and Soundcloud to create my digital story, click below.

Invitation: COLLECT your multimodal content from the past eight learning events. CURATE your digital story using digital tools like Storify or Diigo Outliner. SHARE your creation on Twitter using the hashtag #WalkMyWorld #LE9. It’s time. What will you share? Explore.Play.Create.Learn.

Interested in learning more about #WalkMyWorld, visit: walkmy.world

Shape of MY Story: #WalkMyWorld #LE4

The future isn’t a place that we’re going to, it’s a place that you get to create. - Nancy Duarte

WEEK FOUR: Explore your voice and the sounds of your world by diagramming the events that make up YOUR story.  Last week #WalkMyWorld discussed the shape of a story. First, I diagrammed the Three Act Story Arch of a National History Day Documentary. Then, I found a wonderful TEDX talk by Nancy Duarte that discussed a different shape of a story.  Finally, I found an interesting article about a different shape of a video game narrative. 

This week, #WalkMyWorld invites you to answer these questions: What challenges exist when the story is about you? Use your voice and the sounds of your life to illustrate where you are in your life journey. How do you use language to define who you are and your place in your community/culture?

To begin, I LISTENED to the song from the Disney film, Mulan. Despite the tranquil sounds of nature, she wonders why her reflection doesn't show her authentic self. 

Next, I READ the lyrics to the song so I could get a deeper understanding of her challenges and shape of her story. This song evokes a strong connection to the sounds and shape of MY story which I diagrammed at the beginning of this blog. I realized the shape of my story looks just like the ripples Mulan sees in her reflection. These ripples distort and cloud the authentic reflection of me. Many times I stop and ask myself, "Who am I inside when my reflection shows a mother, a wife, a teacher, a student, a friend, a sister, and a daughter?" At the same time, the shape of my story looks like a speaker, pounding out an orchestra of sounds so loud that I can't think! I hear: cheers of the crowd at my daughters' events, clinking dishes and snoring, the tap, tap, tapping of students typing on keyboards, and the bling of emails and texts calling for my attention. Then, I walk into yoga, where it's warm and quite. I take a deep breath in. I take a deep breath out. Slowly, just as Mulan wipes away her make-up, the sounds that shape my story fade away, til I hear nothing but my heart beat, beat, beating and I am left with nothing but the shape of me. 

Invitation: THINK of sounds that surround you in the morning, noon, and night. CREATE a diagram showing how the sounds shape your story. ANNOTATE your diagram to identify key sounds in the narrative.  SHARE your creation on Twitter using the hashtag #WalkMyWorld #LE4. It’s time. What will you share? Explore.Play.Create.Learn.

Interested in learning more about #WalkMyWorld, visit: walkmy.world

#WalkMyWorld 2016: Past.Present.Future

The best part of #WalkMyWorld is the social scholarship (i.e., community, discussion, and reflection) that occurs. Although teachers talk all day to students, they rarely make the time to talk to colleagues. By keeping #WalkMyWorld open, others may stumble on our discussions and learn, grow, or even join in. If you want to read more about how I created my Personal Learning Network (PLN) from #WalkMyWorld, click HERE.

Should #WalkMyWorld remain open or move to private streaming? 

I keep thinking about where to post #WalkMyWorld information...this answer is vast. In the past, some participants created a new Twitter profile because they didn't want their followers to be a part of their class work or see their students' information. However, some participants didn't like having several different accounts and used the one they had already established. Finally, there were participants who didn't want to post, they wanted to keep everything on paper. So I guess the question is, "What is our purpose for #WalkMyWorld?" Is it to collect data for research, then we should set it up to make the data collection process easy. If our purpose is to teach others how to make meaning from multiple modes through an online learning environment, then we need to use the medium that people will easily share their thinking. Twitter is a platform that is becoming more accessible to educators and classrooms. To me, Twitter is still a valuable medium to share, explore, and play with multimodal meaning-making and digital tools.

As we reflect on the PAST #WalkMyWorld in order to plan for the PRESENT learning events and build a foundation for the FUTURE, I feel the picture below captures the answer. Let's stand in the middle by using Twitter, not only to collaborate and communicate, but to begin to show others about new digital tools like Medium.

How did you get involved in #WalkMyWorld? Did you start as a participant or facilitator? I started out as a participant because I was following Greg McVerry and Ian O'Bryne on Twitter after I met them at an LRA conference. Ian responded to one of my posts and I became more involved. By the end of Learning Event 10,  Ian invited me to help analyze his data. That analysis became a paper, “Social Scholars: Educators Digital Identity Construction in Open, Online Learning Environments," that we presented at the 2014 Literacy Research Association Annual Conference. The paper was recently published in Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, a peer-reviewed publication of the Literacy Research Association. 

How have you grown as a teacher because of #WalkMyWorld? Each day I participate in #WalkMyWorld, I become a more knowledgeable teacher:  1) technological knowledge - everyone shares new tools or aspects of a tool I didn't know I could use; 2) pedagogical knowledge - I read about how other teachers are creating and managing an online learning environments; 3) content knowledge - I have witnessed lesson plans for incorporating technology in science, social studies, math, and English Language Arts. These knowledge components are also known as technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge (TPACK; Koehler & Mishra, 2009) which provides a framework to understand the domains of knowledge educators should have for authentic technology integration.  

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How have your tech skills grown?
My engagement in #WalkMyWorld integrated my theoretical understanding of multimodal composition and my passion for poetry. The #WalkMyWorld community held me accountable for increasing my creativity. At the same time, #WalkMyWorld collaboration gave me support as I tried new techniques and technologies. For example, Kevin Hodgson's interactive poem inspired me to write an interactive poem about the sunrise. Even though Twine was easy to use as a multimodal composition tool, I struggled to embed the poem on the Internet. I used Twitter to contact Kevin for help and we spent several days collaboratively working to solve my technical issues. I also used Twitter to invite the #WalkMyWorld community to write a poem on Goggle Drive. This way I was still involved in the learning event but I shared the responsibility to write a full poem. I was so excited to see how the poem grew and changed as different authors added their voice.  Click HERE if you want to read or write more into the poem.

Interested in other discussions about the planning of #WalkMyWorld 2016? Check out the planning meetings on Google Hangout: Day 1, Day 2 or read the blog posts below:

Kate Booth
Greg McVerry
W. Ian O'Byrne
Carolina Orgnero 
Stephanie Loomis