Digital Storytelling: Empower the Multimodal Writing Classroom with Scratch

How can the busy writing teacher interested in new media storytelling deepen the pedagogical value of multimodality in the classroom — especially for students with limited programming experience? Students who learn to design, code, revise, and publish multimodal texts are empowered by their encounters with technology, and can be more critical of the interfaces they face in daily life. Yet too frequently we ask students to submit a multimedia project at the end of term, without leaving time for drafting, peer-review, and revision of those multimodal texts. This workshop introduces a plan for teaching multimodal composition with MIT’s Scratch (a programming environment for animations and 2D arcade-style games). Scratch is simple enough to be picked up quickly, but offers complex, powerful opportunities for developing, critiquing, and altering a student’s composition process. During the workshop, participants have the opportunity to create simple digital artifacts with Scratch, and to participate in an informal discussion of how a Scratch multimodal project might assist their own pedagogy. – See more at: http://siteslab.org/cwcon/2014/session/w3/digital-storytelling-empower-multimodal#sthash.GuIAGrZN.dpuf

Speaker notes for today’s workshop

MIT’s Scratch website

Finished version of project we’ll be creating

Other sample projects