Reflecting Through Digital Short Stories

Isaac Newton once said: "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants."  My grade 10 students have just completed a unit on Short Stories.  This year the English 10 team incorporated digital storytelling as the final assessment of our Short Story unit.  With the amazing help of my colleagues: Brad, Ronna, Casey and Karen, we created a really fun unit to teach and watch unfold before our very eyes.  We began by reading a multitude of short stories including:

• "Two Kinds" by Amy Tan
• "A Family Supper" by Kazuo Ishiguro
• "A Man With No Eyes" by MacKinlay Kantor
• "The Ninny" by Anton Chekhov
• "Two Words" by Isabella Allende
• "The Stolen Party" by Liliana Heker
• "Lather and Nothing Else" by Hernando Tellez
• "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

We then examined the authoritative intent and theme for each story and viewed different adaptations of these stories over time.  From there, students were given the assignment, shown a Power Point and given the rubric.  The results were fantastic and one of the students from a different class had immediate validation from teachers at SAS.  They posted comments on the digital short story and plan on using the students' digital story in their class to help teach the short story "The Bet".  Talk about authentic assessment!

Dear Mike and Carl, I am an English teacher at the Singapore American school and we are currently studying short stories, one of the short stories is "The Bet" by A. Chekhov, I truly believe that this movie clearly shows the short story and I will definitely show my class this video, Thanks a lot and great job on the movie and the sound it really matches with the story.

As with everything I teach, there are many changes and lessons to learn from this unit.  First and foremost, I would be clearer on the creativity I would like to see from the students.  Too many of the students recreate the story verbatim and after awhile they were a little redundant to watch.  I would also give them the assignment at the start of the unit.  The students had one week to create their stories, with much of the work done at home.  I would also continue to tweak the rubric.  We had students look at the rubric and revise it, but it still needs some work. 

If you'd like to see some of their digital short stories, they can be found on their ePortfolios on my netvibes account.  They are under the Grade 10 tags, but all of them are not uploaded yet.  In the future, I will post some of them here for viewing and continue to upload them to my teachwatts youtube account, but for now the following take on "Two Words" by Sarah is one of my favorites: