Digital Images in theLanguage Arts Classroom

I think that using digital images and new age technology in the classroom is proving to be beneficial for all students. At my school, we too bring digital technology into the classroom and use it to expand what we are learning about in reading. All of my students are diagnosed with autism, and these tools have really helped everyone in the class to gain a better understanding of everything that we are learning about. We just finished doing a unit around Goldilocks and the Three Bears. We used our smartboard to show various videos of the same basic story. This really helped the children who had difficulty processing the textual format of the book to gain a more concrete understanding of the story. We looked out how all of the stories were basically the same but examined the differences in each one. It was nice that the kids got to see that there could be more than one ending to this story. It helped my students to become more abstract, by giving them ideas for alternate endings. Although we didn't take digital storytelling beyond this, (because it is too complex for my students at the current time), I have already experienced how beneficial introducing these alternate modes of the story can be for them. In the future, maybe I can start to introduce digital storytelling into the classroom further by giving my students some choices of pictures that they might want to use to create a similar story of their own.

- Megan Miller