Four Key Benefits of Providing Digital Resources for Student Projects (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: There are four benefits in having these resources available for students. First is that the blueprints that we require students to create before they created anything were more sophisticated and detailed. I think this was due to the fact that they got to see a lot of examples of posters, websites, and videos, as well as see the opportunity to see what tools they could use and what these tools were capable of doing and the features it had. The second benefit was that within one class session, students were exposed to three different digital tools for three different types of digital media. With the traditional model of me standing there and teaching students how to use the tools, this would have taken three separate class sessions, maybe even more. The third benefit was that the experience was personalized because they got to make their own decisions and make their own choices. They got to decide on which media to choose. Their decision was based on their own preferences, strengths, interests, or needs. They were even allowed to learn at their own pace. The fourth benefit and the one that was most valuable to me was that I got to help students with the creative side of digital media, as well as the storytelling aspect of content creation. I was not in front of the class spending the whole class session on teaching one digital tool, having the whole class go step by step on how to use the tool. Since the resources, especially the tutorials, contained pretty much everything they needed to know on how to use the tools, I was not really there for tech support like I usually am. But I was actually there for the content, helping students think of creative, engaging, and effective ways to communicate their ideas. For example, like using graphic design and making sure their message was clear to their audience of how our choices as consumers impact our world. I helped students with developing storyboards, or the layout of their poster, or the content that would be in the webpage. During my time in facilitating this part of the project, I was only asked tech support questions about a handful of times, and didn't even provide much tech instruction.