"Marchen or Sagen" - A Digital Story Telling Experience

Our Goal is to create a Digital Story about a topic of personal interest.
Foldlorist divide oral tales into two groups: (1) Marchen, which loosely translates as "fairy tale" and (2) Sagen, best translated as legend, based on actual happenings. Digital storytelling is first storytelling and second, digital. Technology allows us to craft stories that reach people on many levels. These productions will include images, video clips, music and narration. Through technology the art of storytelling is evolving, but we can preserve the individuality of the oral story through digital media. Digital storytelling is an exciting way for my students to become involved in technology which is both challenging and includes higher level thinking skills. We will create our personal stories in a chosen genre and then develop characters, establish a plot, create a setting and choose background music and scenery. We will use descriptive words to develop narrative and create tone. We will brainstorm using a webcam and propose our story ideas. All students, professionals who are invited (we have one published author who has agreeded to participate), parents, etc. will criticize, analyze, judge and recommend changes. Objective I - Story planning: The Learner will compose, rewrite, reorganize, and develop a storyline that establishes a "got you" aspect so that the audience is mesmerized and can not look away, does not want to miss the ending. Ideas will be blogged so that we can obtain feedback and ideas from others interested in our project Students can visit websites provided for storytelling ideas and hints.
Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and other family members will be interviewed and content from their "story" will be included in our tales. Students will gain interview techniques and public speaking skills as well as a sense of ancestry.
Objective II - Preproduction: The Learner will determine if the story lends itself to one individual telling the story or if we need a cast of characters to tell the story. Either way we will use Movie Maker to bring our stories to life. We will create scenery and backgrounds, extract portions of the music we will use.
Objective III - Production: The Learner will finish the media components that compose the story and assemble then into a rough draft using Movie Maker. At this point the story will be in draft form and can be viewed by others
Objective IV - Postproduction: The Learner will finalize the project. We will edit, re-do video and audio where needed.
Objective V - Performance, Posting, Showing, and Distribution: The Learner will view final projects.
We will create a Wiki to showcase our digital stories and other class projects. This will create a classroom without walls and allow my students to reach others in a global atmosphere.
This activity will not only improve technology skills, but will also challenge students to improve communication skills, grammar and writing, and public speaking. Because the scripting tools include multiple actors, students will also develop teamwork skills.
Storytelling is as old as time itself and my students will become "Global Storytellers".