Employers for Education Excellence

The Academy of Arts and Academics (A3) in Springfield, Oregon provides challenging, personalized learning with an emphasis on the arts. At A3 digital storytelling projects served as the culminating activities for a ten–week unit on revolutions in society. Working in small groups, students researched and synthesized the major themes of their topics, and organized their ideas to create informative videos.

Digital storytelling is an example of how A3 scaffolds learning, providing students with the tools, skills and information they need to produce high quality final products that are fully integrated into rigorous presentation of academic content and that promotes deep learning.

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Teacher Video

Instructors: Aaron Molyneux, Scott Crowell, Josh Metzger, Daniel Ramirez

Participating teachers spent two days taping and assembling a short outreach video about their small school, its philosophy and design. This PD workshop models key aspects of a digital storytelling experience by asking teachers to take on the role of learners as they consider questions of audience, asset gathering, project planning and teaming while they assemble their own short video.

Supporting Materials

Student Spotlight Videos

Click below to view examples of exemplary student work. These products showcase how individual students and project teams responded to the digital storytelling design model, which incorporated familiar project-based learning criteria – the driving question, speaking and writing tasks, habits of mind, the notion of an authentic audience – as a framework for the project and the hands-on workshop.