DS106

My favorite part of ds106 is how it brings so many people together! It’s a little bit hard to understand at first. It took me 2 days of looking over the sites really even begin to get an understanding of it. It’s a digital storytelling guide that originated during a college course for computer science. Ds106 gives daily create challenges. There are 5 types of challenges: photography, video, audio, drawing and writing. Digital storytelling is defined as “using digital tools so that ordinary people can tell their own real-life stories.” Really, this happens for a lot of people on a daily-basis, they just don’t realize it.

Ds106 is really intimidating to me because I don’t consider myself creative at all. Some of the assignments on the website reminded me of assignments I did in my high school photography class. I would definitely say that of the 5 categories, photography would be my strongest.

I think you could incorporate ds106 into the classroom for any grade level. I want to teach kindergarten, and I think it could be used similar to how Daily 5 rotations are used. With Daily 5, students rotate through 5 different stations for about 20 minutes each. The stations are based around reading and writing. However, you could make one of those stations a daily create station. For photography, video and audio, students could use their iPad to do their creating. Although photography isn’t related to reading and writing so much, it’s good to mix things up and keep students engaged. Audio and video help students work on their speaking skills, especially when they can listen to themselves. Writing obviously fits in well. Drawing is like photography, but you could ask students to write 1-2 sentences about what they drew, or record themselves telling about it. Each student has a checklist for the daily create station, and once they’ve done one of the categories, they mark it off. They must do all 5 during the week, a different one each day. I know some teachers do kind of boring writing prompts for Daily 5, so I would replace that with a daily create instead. When I’ve subbed, some of the Daily 5 stations turn into talk to your neighbor stations. Kids just aren’t interested in doing “boring” work. I think doing a daily create allows kids to utilize their creativity, which is important so that they don’t lose it. They can express themselves, which most students like to do. Then, they also have cool, fun work to showcase and show off.

I think I could look through the ds106 stuff every day and still see new things. I look forward to learning more and doing my own Create Challenge!