Tell Me a (Digital) Story

So our next stop on the Educational Technology express is...YouTube. Okay, not exactly, but when you're talking about digital storytelling, nothing else comes close to the magnitude and scope of YouTube. I actually feel pretty good about my classes when it comes to this topic. I know that I could be doing more - much more - with digital storytelling, but I do regularly use YouTube for videos on historical background on authors or certain works, for how-to videos and also to help bring a dynamic element to a topic we're studying. For example, a few weeks ago we were exploring Harlem Renaissance poetry in my American Literature classes and rather than just read through selected works we started class with a five minute background video on the Harlem Renaissance from Discovery Streaming Video, worked through three poems from our text, watched a video clip of Denzel Washington presenting "I, Too" by Langston Hughes. I think this is cool so I posted the video. =)

Then we worked through a few Hughes poems and finished off class with a YouTube video that featured Harlem Renaissance artwork, a recording of Hughes reading a poem. It was one of the best classes we've had this semester and mostly, I believe, because the digital storytelling made our class so dynamic (the great poetry didn't hurt too much either).
I think though, the best digital storytelling comes from my students and their creative abilities. In my classes my students have the opportunities to create any number of different projects to present to the class. Creating a PowerPoint isn't good enough for most of them anymore. Instead, many of my students choose to create videos that allow them to put their mark on our topic. Some of the videos are not that great, but many of them are fantastic. The videos that followed our recent unit on The Great Gatsby were especially good.
I think that digital storytelling is a natural fit in literature classes, because literature is all about storytelling. This is something that I am looking to continually feature in my classes. On my campus, the biggest challenge is that our students are not allowed on YouTube. That's a obstacle that I've yet to figure out. Hopefully there is a solution out there somewhere though.