“A narrative experience like ‘The Lizzie Bennet Diaries’ is compelling in part because of the great bones of Austen’s story and characters, for sure. But equally compelling is the story form, the opportunity for consumers to engage deeply with those characters…”
“Fans will not only have the opportunity to interact with the story, but actually be a part of it.”
The task for educators is not to drain this sense of open-ended exploration from student-fans but rather to make sure that it is accompanied by the Jiminy Cricket-like voice of critical literacy…
Together we looked for ‘cheese holes’, or spaces in the story that allow the audience to participate in, contribute further to, and augment the original story using their own intelligence and imagination.
“One of the students said to me, ‘You know IWitness is kind of like a cross between a library and YouTube.’”
“How can you tell a story in a game and have it be school-appropriate, while simultaneously making the student think about the implications of what they enjoy playing?”
“By allowing students to create with a medium, you give them the chance to explore the potential of the medium and of themselves. The exploration of potential is beautiful…”
Teaching librarians and language arts educators have, via fandom, a unique opening to reframe netiquette as something other than a subset of character education or online safety.
“There’s a shift towards a more multimodal ways of communicating through digital videos, VoiceThread, and graphic novels/comics that is more appealing and engaging to adolescents who now expect such multimodal ways of learning…”
Teachers don’t have to teach Harry Potter, Captain America, or World of Warcraft, but they can allow students to build their writing on these stories.
Latest Stories from School Library Journal
Recent Comments