Another digital storytelling workshop

Back from my European vacation (Amsterdam and a Baltic cruise with my mother and daughter... three generations in a standard stateroom... at least we had a veranda for extra space!). On Monday and Tuesday this week, Erin and I conducted a digital storytelling workshop with more than 20 teachers, counselors and the principal of a middle school/high school in a small town in Washington state as part of their Navigation 101 program. This is the third Nav 101 school in Washington where we have provided this training. The size of the workshop, and the diversity of the group meant that we were training on Macintosh (iMovie6HD), and several versions of MovieMaker (XP, Vista, 7). Erin took the Mac group and I stayed with the Windows group, who were actually using iMacs that booted to Windows XP (as Erin said, it just didn't seem right!). But the tech person said that the Mac hardware was the most reliable!

Despite the fact that the teachers accounts were blocked from access to Flickr and websites for royalty-free music, they were able to produce some very moving stories, many of them about family or friends. I was most impressed with their very tech-savvy principal who was a full participant in the workshop at the beginning of a very busy school year! She shared her story in her blog. I hope they will get students producing digital stories during this school year to support their student-led conferences. Here is the blog of a teacher in the school, with his digital story about the life cycle of a salmon! This is the first digital storytelling workshop that I have conducted where not only one but two of the participants posted their stories to YouTube on their own, even though I encourage individuals to publish their own stories when the workshop is over.