Once a video is made by students, it is important that they can showcase this work and teachers can quickly access it.  I have found Google Drive to be an efficient system for collecting, organising and showcasing student videos.

For any videos made on the iPad, we need to make sure that the Google Drive app is installed.  Students can then save their videos to the camera roll on the iPad and from there upload directly to Google Drive as follows:

Step 1. Look for and click on the share button icon (in Adobe Voice this is located on the top right hand side of the screen).

Step 2. Click on the icon of a camera to save the video to the iPad’s camera roll.

Step 3. Wait a moment while the video saves.

Step 4. Open up the Google Drive app on the iPad.  Click on the icon of a plus sign + to create a new file.  Then click Upload.

Step 5. Once the video has uploaded, click on the (i) button.

Step 6. Click Add people.  Students should also make sure that they click Get Link, so that once embedded into their digital portfolios, the video can be viewed by everyone on the school domain.

Step 7. The student should then type in the teacher’s email address, so that the teacher can access the video.  They can then embed the video to the digital portfolio.

The teacher will be able to view all the student videos in the ‘Shared with me’ section of Google Drive.  I recommend creating a folder called Digital Stories and copying all students’ videos into this folder.

According to Riessman (2008, pp. 12), narrative is the basic human way of making sense of the world because we all lead ‘storied lives’.  This has been true throughout history and across cultures.  Technology, therefore, can certainly add an interesting dimension to the storytelling process, enabling students to experiment with animation, music and different applications.

As I explain to my students, digital storytelling is simply the practice of telling stories using digital tools.  It can be a fantastic topic for them, as it provides the opportunity to learn about the whole process involved in video production.

I made this video to introduce the topic, which covers some quick tips for digital storytelling:

Students then watch the example of a digital story mentioned in the tutorial video:

Following on from this, students choose one of the many biographies (pictured below) that I collected from the school library to use as the basis for their digital story.  By giving learners the task of producing a third person (biographical) digital story first, they can more readily find interesting facts and images to use for their video.

Although there are many great applications out there, I have found Adobe Voice on the iPad to be one of the easiest for learners to use in order to make their first digital story.  Learners quickly get to grips with making good quality digital stories using this app, and it helps them to learn the fundamentals of video editing.

References:

Reissman, C.K. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. London & Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications