Everyone has a digital story to tell, what's yours? How do you produce your digital story? As a metaliterate learner, you are an active producer of information who is empowered to take charge of your own story and tell it in a way that an audience will relate to. You play many different metaliterate learner roles as well. You are a communicator of information who thinks carefully about the content of your story, and how to tell it to a specific group or perhaps a wider audience. You are a researcher who investigates a topic to discover reliable sources of information to support the credibility of your story. You are a translator of information who adapts ideas from one form to another, or who translates one media format into another. You may want to turn a memory or a dream into a digital story for others to experience, or you may want to translate an old photograph or audio recording into a multimedia story. Where do you begin when creating your story? Let's start with the idea, perhaps you are interested in sharing a memory based on your own life experience; for example, let's say you've conducted research into your family ancestry. How might this experience translate into a digital story? Once you develop an idea, you'll need to think about the content and materials for your narrative. Depending on the topic you choose, you may need to conduct supporting research. If you are telling your digital story based on your own life experience, you may want to use primary sources such as your own photographs, digital images, audio recordings, videos, or interviews, or you may want to create something new. If your story involves further background information or historical research, you will want to explore the primary sources available at your local library or archive. Imagine the impact in original letter, old photograph, newspaper clipping, or historical object would have on telling your digital story. If you narrative requires additional research on a topic or issue, you will need secondary sources as well such as a book, journal article, or reliable online resource. Be sure to evaluate every source for credibility. Write down the record or title, author, and all relevant information about every source so that you can give credit to that resource as part of your digital story. Now that you have the content and materials for your story idea, start planning. Draft an outline of your story to organize ideas into a logical and creative flow. Then, write a script and think about how your story will be narrated. Consider the relationship between the text and the visual materials you'll use such as digital images and videos. Storyboards allow you to create visual panels for all of your main ideas, and to organize each story box to see how each one will flow into the other. How will you create your digital story, and what kinds of technology or applications might be needed to design and share your production? You may want to keep it simple and use your cell phone or mobile device to record digital images, videos, narration, or interviews using your built-in camera and microphone. You can also search online for reliable and easy to use applications that help you record and edit images, video, audio, and music into a combined multimedia production. There are many online sources that allow you to upload images and videos for sharing with others as well. When searching for digital tools, always look for free or inexpensive resources that are recommended by other storytellers and are fairly easy to use. As you create your own digital story, consider searching through the creative commons for digital images and videos that are openly licensed for you to use, as long as you follow the proper attribution of the license assigned by the creator of that information. Once you create your own digital story, you can explore the license options available at the creative commons to make your own work available for others to access and even reuse. As a digital storyteller, reflect on the many metaliterate learner roles you play such as producer, communicator, translator, author, and researcher. As you create your story, you may be a collaborator who works with others on a team-based narrative. You may be a teacher who shares knowledge about the process, or who tells a story that shows others how to do something, or how to gain insights from life experience. You will gain several of the metaliterate learner characteristics as well. So think about how this production taught you to be informed about a topic, reflective about the experience, adaptable to the application of new technologies, or civic minded about a community story. We all have stories to tell, what's yours?
