Digital Stories - Marco Style

Once again Marco Torres and his Alas Media crew has introduced teachers to the use of storytelling, visuals and personal narrative during a two day pre-conference session at Building Learning Communites 2009 in Boston last month.

What I like about Marco's brand of digital storytelling is how he has his participants select one of their passions as their topic and then write about it -- or visually display the passion with music and no words in some cases.

This is not an easy task to accomplish in two days. Not only do participants need to "bring along" raw materials [or search for them], but they need to write a narrative that makes sense, match it with music, then stitch it all together in short order.

Notice how the topic titles are usually one word titles which give a hint to the viewer about what the story will be about. Then, it is up to the author to tell the story. Empty, Afraid, Family, Passion, Drama, and Baseball are just a few of the titles. Simple and clear.

I'd really like to be in the classrooms of these 13 teachers this school year to be a part of the excitement as they share their new-found digital storytelling skills with their students. Wouldn't you?

View the latest batch. Best viewed in Safari or Firefox.