Oct 2 Nashman Faculty Check-in: Guest Speakers from CREATE Studio

Guest speakers at the October 2nd Nashman Faculty Check-in were Ben Horn and Joshua Gleason, from GW’s Instructional Core CREATE Digital Studio. https://library.gwu.edu/create

View a recording of this presentation: https://gwu.box.com/s/qpouqk3792zeyws9r7e6q5yrym7luybj

They are here to help faculty and students learn to use the software we have at our disposal to expand the digital storytelling potential of our academic projects. This includes asynchronous workshops on using multimedia tools or visiting your courses synchronously to teach students to use the tools they’ll need to use to do their assignment. 

The best way to get started with them is to schedule a time for an individual consult. They can learn about your course, the assignment you have in mind, and can recommend the right tech tool and student training approach. Know that once we’re all back on campus, they also have equipment checkout and high-powered computers for editing multimedia.

As we’ve shared, digital storytelling is an approach that many faculty in community engaged scholarship courses use for reflection assignments. This approach is an innovative way for students to demonstrate their meaning making and critical and creative thinking, their understanding of complex social issues and the complexities of problem solving, and to weave scholarly knowledge with community knowledge. There are a lot of resources available out there on digital storytelling and service-learning.  

Digital Storytelling for Student Reflection Assignments

It’s important however, for students to put their effort into critical thinking, meaning-making, and communication - not into figuring out how to use the tech tools. So the CREATE Studio team is here to help them with that part, and they are here to help faculty determine which tools are the right fit for their goals. 

Ben and Joshua provided a quick overview of a few likely to be of most interest to us. Again, all GW faculty and students have free access to these tools (https://it.gwu.edu), and they are platforms frequently used in professional settings, so this will be useful skill-building for students.

• Premier Rush - for video editing. This is a simple and intuitive platform, which can even be run on a students’ smart phone. Some students already know how to use the more feature-rich Premier Pro. 
• Spark - for creating interactive webpages, which can be published for free. 
• Audition - audio editing software for editing interviews and field recordings or even creating podcasts.

A few other platforms were mentioned as well for multimedia work like photo editing, animation, making smart phone apps, or creating professional still work like posters or brochures.  https://library.gwu.edu/news-events/events/creating-stylish-graphics-illustrator

!! Note that the Adobe Creative Cloud includes a “Education Exchange” in which faculty share their assignments, grading rubrics, and examples of student work. https://edex.adobe.com/

We wrapped the conversation by discussing the importance of emphasizing the quality of student thinking and communication over fixation on learning to use all the features of the tech tools. Assignment design is important.