eBooks and Digital Storytelling…What’s the Story?

Digital storytelling is a win, win for teachers, students and school library media specialists. Digital storytelling is rarely in my school. However, there are a lot of great ideas that could be incorporated into our curriculum. Our teacher cadet students do “fake” Facebook pages (we can’t access Facebook at school) for an introductory lesson to their students. I think it would be cool to do a personal narrative using digital storytelling. Our Culinary Arts students could use the digital storytelling to do an instructional lesson for a specific recipe they have invented. Our social studies department did a digital storytelling unit using PhotoStory during Black History Month. My role to with these lessons would be to support the students and teachers with their research skills, technology skills and presentation skills. This would also be a good use of the SmartBoard in the media center. Digital storytelling, in my opinion, will make the reluctant learners more interested in learning and difficult content more understandable.

We have 65 eBooks in my media center. They are not circulated only because we have had difficulty with downloading the appropriate readers. We hope to have this situation fixed by next school year. The 65 eBooks are mostly classics. The classics include The Call of the Wild, Great Expectations, The Iliad, etc. We also have quite a bit of William Shakespeare’s work on eBook. I was blown away by the amount of eBooks available on The Gutenberg Project. On April 17th, 2010 92,171 were downloaded! Yes, eBooks have a future in the media center. I have weeded hundreds of books this year that haven’t been checked out in 20 years. What a waste of money? I feel that the eBook will eliminate wasting of paper books. I hope that eBooks will soon be the new textbook. As textbook manager, it is difficult to manage so many textbooks and students. I hope that the day will come when each student can download all their textbooks onto one e-reader. I’m sure it would be more cost efficient.