Digital Storytelling: Using Producer’s Commentary in the Classroom

abstract:In this essay, the author echoes the importance of digital storytelling as an opportunity for identity construction, art-making, and teaching and learning with technology. The author begins with the concept of assemblage as key to the creation of digital stories and offers an analysis of one students’ digital story to illustrate pedagogical possibilities in the college classroom. The author suggests the use of producer’s commentary as a method toward deeper understandings of do-it-yourself media production, layers of meaning within the digital story from the student’s perspective, and various other elements behind the scenes that otherwise might not be captured through traditional methods. In the end, the use of producer’s commentary in a New Media Literacies class was instructive to gain a better sense of how students themselves perceived and pulled together their digital stories to inform classroom practice.