Journal #5 – Storytelling and Education

In the article, “Storytelling in the Web 2.0 Era,” by Glenn Bull the author discusses the meaning of Web 2.0 and its effect on technological storytelling and its interaction with education. The most interesting and classroom applicable part was the web ‘storytelling.’ According to the article, this type of ‘storytelling’ has to do with the insurgence of a variety of web tools to create a story in a new and interactive way. This allows for teachers and students to tell or even perhaps retell a story in a new and unique way with the interaction of two or more types of media that can be shared on the web. A few examples are slideshow, mapping and scrapping as ways to interact with the material. These would be particularly useful for either a history or language arts class where students typically use graphic organizers to recall events in a story. But in this case they could create projects to show their understanding of the story using technology. They could collaborate in groups of two or three and interact with technology while successively showing their understanding and comprehension of the material they read. Reading comprehension is something even higher achievers struggle with. They can discuss their thoughts create pre-creation activities and have the assistance of a program to edit their work and sentence structure. For students with special needs that have trouble writing, digitally creating their ideas would provide a viable alternative. The margin for success would be higher for all students regardless of need.
Question #1:
How does Glenn Bull address the viewpoint of not integrating this type of technology due to cost?
Glenn states that given the integration of Web 2.0 there is no cost to schools to utilize this type of technology. He also says given these programs are web based and free students and other can access them from anywhere in order to complete and work with these frames. He discusses the more than 50 different applications and their presence and their ability to be used in the classroom. He does however believe their usage will require creativity and thoughtfulness. Each type of modality must be utilized to get the most out of their projects and assignments. But this is simply reminding teachers to use best practices, even when it comes to technology integration.
Question #2:
What are the four attributes of Web 2.0 and describe one of them.
Publisher Tim O’Reily popularized the term and defined its four parts as, web as a platform, user generated content, sharing and remixing, economic and educational value. The most interesting one for me was the ‘economic and educational value’ element. This particular one has two parts the economic side which refers to the sheer ‘dirt cheapness’ of this new Web 2.0 idea. That is, everything is available on the internet and free to access and use. The educational value was discussed when the author went into the value of this framework in the classroom and its applicability into a variety of ways and subjects. It is simply invaluable to teachers and we must take advantage for the sake of our children’s knowledge and integrate it as creatively, carefully and abundantly as possible.