RESEARCH, EXPERIENCE
AND REFLECTION
THROUGH DIGITAL
STORIES
Presented by:
Emma Bless & Micol Hammack
MERC, Spring 2012
What is Focused Inquiry?

VCU’s first year seminar-style course that teaches
these fundamental skills:
 Writing




Reflection
Narrative
Analysis and synthesis
Argument
 Speaking
 Research
(information retrieval)
 Quantitative Reasoning
 Ethical Reasoning
 Critical
thinking
What is Focused Inquiry?

Shares many of the same objectives as K-12 but
with some differences
 Interdisciplinary
 No
SOLs
Reflecting and Arguing


Reflection on topic, learning, and self
Exploration  argument
The Assignment
Your final project for Focused Inquiry is a digital
story. A digital story is a video that combines still
images with narrative and possibly music.
Topic of digital story: Your digital story will be your
reflection on your topic from Unit II, on the research
you’ve done, and the answers or conclusions you’ve
come to. You could think of it as telling the story of
your journey through the process, a journey of
knowledge and learning. How you organize and
structure this digital story is entirely up to you, and
creativity is encouraged.
The assignment, cont.
Details: You should aim for your digital story to
be approximately three minutes long and definitely
no longer than six minutes. It is much better to plan
and polish a focused story than to include too much.
Generally, a three-minute digital story will have 515 images and the script would be about 200
words long. You should use these figures as
guidelines.
Goals of Assignment





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Bring together research and (guided) reflection
Allow opportunity for creativity
Allow opportunity for polish (ELLs)
Explore what makes a narrative engaging
Create a useful, usable final product
Introduce students to a new medium
Assessment based on:





Quality of product (narration, sound quality, photo
selection, transitions)
Quality of narrative (Was the story engaging, and
interesting?)
Inclusion of personal and research
Fulfillment of assignment requirements (length,
number of photos…)
+ additional motivator: student votes
Examples
1.
Justin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_hN9hMARBY
2.
David
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4FWu3tOjgk
3.
Emma
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NoHdi43ems
Programs used:
Photo Story
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx
?displaylang=en&id=11132
 iMovie

Adapting to pre-college level


Technology
In-class v. out-of-class
Thank you!

Micol Hammack
 mhammack@vcu.edu

Emma Bless
 blesser@vcu.edu