Telling Tales in a Technopoly: Getting Started with Digital Storytelling

I believe that storytelling is central to our humanity. We tell stories all the time, from personal histories, to imaginative bedtime stories, to morality tales, to socio-political narratives...the way we use "story" is a central part of our lives. Even the main way God has revealed Himself--the Bible--is largely comprised of stories, that combine to tell The Big Story of scripture: the Creation, the Fall, the Redemption, and the Consummation. And honestly, I think that part of how we reflect God's image is through our creativity (i.e., He is the Creator, which means we have the capability of being creative as well.)

Stories have a unique pull and an emotional element that "just the facts" cannot provide. Kieran Egan, in his lovely little book Teaching as Storytelling, says, "A good story-teller plays our emotions, as a good violinist plays a violin" (1986, p. 29). And I believe that it is this aspect that makes storytelling an essential teaching methodology, even in our high-tech world; perhaps it is even more important in our high tech world! In his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Neil Postman writes that one of the essential features of a Technopoly (a culture in which technology not only plays a central role, but actually is the dominant worldview-shaper) is "the elevation of information to a metaphysical status: information as both the means and end of human creativity" (1992, p. 61) This rings true for me: we've often heard the old saying "knowledge is power," right? But is "knowing" the information enough? Information in what context? And for what purpose?

Easy to Use iPad Animation Creator

So you want to have your elementary or middle school students create short, narrated animations on their iPads? I just came across a nifty app to do just that.

Check out Tellagami. This free app is ridiculously easy to use. After downloading it, I handed the iPad to my 7-year-old and told her to check out the new app. First use, she had figured it out in about one minute with no coaching from Dad.

Easy to animate. Gestures added automatically and the mouth
movements sync to the audio (or text-to-speech) quite well.