Digital Storytelling begins

I am so excited to learn about Digital Storytelling, a way to express myself on the web using all of its capabilities. Since I teach English in Tokyo with technology, I am looking forward to integrating this into my seminar class with my best students in our new academic year starting in April.

Just a quick note, I have two other sites where student work is regularly posted. ShowaELC is for news about our university (Showa Women’s) and our English Department (ELC, or English Language and Communication). LanguageJapan is for student input from my (and my friend’s) classes. These are mostly audio and video podcasts, with the focus on explaining things about Japan to people who speak English, from the point of view of a university student.

The Digital Storytelling MOOC (Massively Online Open Course) is my third in a row. I collaborated with 1,300 other teachers online last fall in a great course on building a Personal Learning Network (PLE) called PLENK. As that ended, I started a much smaller, simpler collaboration (most would not call it a MOOC, but an online book discussion) centering around Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. The Rose in Winter has been a bit of a disappointment as the interactivity level could be more robust, but it did allow me to bounce my thoughts off others, and for me to learn other viewpoints. Still, with such a rich book for discussion, it has been a whole new way for me to read fiction.