Giving students a voice to tell their story

I think at a baseline, everyone wants to be known and understood. Whether it’s reflected in the clothes we wear, how we decorate the spaces we occupy, or the stories we tell about ourselves, people have an inherent desire for others to know what makes them unique. I find this to be especially true in the classes I teach. Leaving home and starting at a university can be a shock to someone’s identity as they leave behind all the structures that both filled their days and shaped the way they were known to those around them.

My classes are generally pretty big and always full. Even with extreme effort, it can be hard to learn the names and backgrounds of each person. In the early days of my teaching, I would have the students write an essay about themselves sharing some autobiographical information. While these essays were helpful, I struggled to remember specific details about each student after reading 100 or so of these things, and they eventually all kind of oozed together. I knew there had to be a better way to let my students introduce themselves other than giving them a writing assignment.

Having taught edtech classes in the past, I tried a few different formats over the years. One year I had the students make a digital poster - a collage, infographic, or comic - to share important information about themselves, but it lacked the context I needed to identify with the students. The only way to provide background information to their images was through captions (more writing!), and once again I felt like I was staring at a big bowl of noodles, trying to untangle everyone’s stories. Another strategy was digital storytelling, where students would narrate images using their own voice, but the technical complexity of these projects made them hard to implement at scale.

At the time, digital storytelling was quite a heavy lift for even the most experienced techies. As an edtech instructor, I loved these projects because of all the embedded skills needed to turn all these disparate pieces of media into a streaming story. Each digital story involved editing images, using video editing software, rendering the project into a video file, and hosting the file on the web to share with others. Despite all the work involved, my students seemed to love the challenge and finished product. The problem, of course, was that every step is also a potential snag which results in the need for help. The thought of so many students working on so many different platforms with so many different tools made my head spin. Before I even gave the assignment, I could see the emails literally cascading into my inbox until all that was left was my battered arm extending a white flag from a heaping pile of bytes.

As a doc student at the University of Virginia, I worked on a team of developers and researchers to address this problem. My colleague and mentor, Bill, had run into the same issue at his son’s school when he helped the students create digital storytelling. The technical hurdles of installing software, obtaining licenses, curating media, and saving projects to specific lab computers made this project more trouble than it was worth. Based on this experience, we developed PrimaryAccess, the world’s first (as far as we knew in 2005) cloud-based video editor. Teachers could create projects with curated media, and students would combine selected media with their own writing to create short digital stories. They would then add their narration and background music, if they so desired. The projects were stored and streamed directly from the cloud. No rendering, no exporting, no hosting. Just click Publish and Share. This particular tool was not without its bugs, but it seemed like the future of digital storytelling at the time. Unfortunately, PrimaryAccess never reached a point where it could be seamlessly deployed at scale without the need for significant tech support along the way.

Enter Adobe Spark Video (now Adobe Creative Cloud Express). Adobe CC Express Video (https://www.adobe.com/express/create/video) offers a simple yet powerful video-editing tool almost perfectly crafted for digital storytelling. I will go into more detail about the actual video editor in a subsequent post, so let me just tell you, this tool has been a game-changer in my classes. The interface is simple enough that with just a few instructions and a couple of tutorial videos, every student in my class can create a short introduction of themselves in just about an hour. Do I still get questions from students? Occasionally, but they are few and typically easy to answer (spoiler: they almost always involve submitting the projects to the LMS). The feedback I get from students is that they spend more time deciding what they want to say than they do putting the project together, which is HOW IT SHOULD BE. I want students taking a deep dive into what they want to share about themselves, not beating their head against the wall because of the tech! And the results are powerful. I hear students introducing me to their families, recounting significant experiences in their lives, discussing certain challenges or hardships they might be facing, and sharing their hopes and goals for their future in their own voices. For me, it has become an important first step in getting to know my students, and I’m amazed at how many of the details I remember even after the semester is over. I attribute this to the fact that they are sharing this information using their own voice.

If you are interested in this assignment, you can view it here: I Wish My Teacher Knew …, and you can see a short example of what my students create.