I'm passing along comments from Mikah Pritchard, instructional technologist
at DePauw U., who is heading our digital storytelling efforts.
Donnie
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*We have several classes at DePauw that have implemented Digital
Storytelling (DST) for both formative and summative assessment. **We
believe **DST expands the ways in which you can assess what your students
learn, and in which they assess their own learning. DST projects aligned
with course content -- whether used as the core of the course or as a final
project -- are typically created in stages, allowing assessment to be
carried out after a student completes each project stage, from mapping
through production. *
We offer three key factors when developing an assessment strategy 1)
Technology 2) Benchmarks 3) Goals & Expectations. The technology used
greatly depends on the faculty member's comfort level with grading
differing projects. Faculty who take a holistic grading approach are free
to support technologies from Storify to VoiceThread. Those faculty who
prefer a more analytic grading approach often find that identifying one or
two acceptable technologies is helpful. Benchmarks for assessment are often
defined during the planning process. These benchmarks scaffolds the project
as well as allows students to receive valuable feedback at pivotal points
within the project. Lastly, having faculty establish their goals and
expectations for student projects is extremely important. Once again, these
can be set up as holistic or analytic as they desire, but we recommend that
they are clearly expressed to students at the beginning of the project.
Common places for these to appear are in syllabi, handouts for explanation
of the project, and in the form of a rubric.