Dr. Sheila Marie Aird and Dr. Tom Mackey presented Collaborating to Teach Global Digital Storytelling Online at SUNY’s 29th Annual Conference on Instruction & Technology (CIT 2021). This year’s virtual CIT explores the theme Working Together to Prepare all Students for a Lifetime of Learning. This presentation explores the fully online Digital Storytelling course at SUNY Empire State College. It addresses the overall design of the class, specific assignments, the integration of the metaliteracy model, the use of open educational resources (OER), and ongoing revisions to build a collaborative learning community. Several resources and takeaways are provided as part of the presentation.

Dr. Sheila Marie Aird and Dr. Tom Mackey will present on their international collaboration to teach Digital Storytelling at SUNY’s 29th Annual Conference on Instruction & Technology (CIT 2021). The presentation entitled “Collaborating to Teach Global Digital Storytelling Online” will explore their revision of the fully online Digital Storytelling course to unite SUNY Empire State College students from around the world. The theme of this year’s virtual conference is Working Together to Prepare all Students for a Lifetime of Learning and will take place May 24-28, 2021. According to the proposal that was accepted by SUNY Faculty Advisory Council on Teaching & Technology (FACT2) and the CIT Planning Committee, this presentation will address the following:

During a global pandemic Drs. Mackey and Aird worked together as a teaching team to combine our fully online sections of Digital Storytelling to create an inspiring international learning experience. As part of this collaboration, we expanded our course at SUNY Empire State College to connect learners from the United States and Canada with students in our international partnership programs in the Czech Republic (Prague), and Albania (Tirana). This fully online course prepares students to create their own empowering digital narratives and to collaborate on a final digital story about a cause they identify and examine in a collaborative digital project. Many of the teams selected the COVID-19 pandemic as their final topic while others explored issues related to racial justice and gender equity.

CIT 2021 presentation proposal (Aird and Mackey)

Drs. Aird and Mackey are scheduled to present at the CIT 2021 virtual conference on May 26th between 2:45 PM – 3:15 PM. We hope to see you there!

As our global digital storytelling collaboration continues, we share our thoughts about the first few weeks of class and offer suggestions for script writing and storyboarding as part of the process. We share our thoughts about Envisioning Your Digital Stories during this interactive Zoom call that we prepared and recorded for students in our fully online Digital Storytelling course at SUNY Empire State College. As part of this week’s call, we also discuss the value of collaboration and peer review. At this point in the course, students have introduced themselves through original selfie-videos and are sharing their insights about defining the topic of digital storytelling itself. The concept of metaliteracy is introduced so that students start to see how being a digital storyteller relates to becoming a responsible and creative producer of information.
-Prof. Aird & Prof. Mackey