On this page we will be assembling materials that might help those of you who might like to work with students in the making of short documentary videos that capture life stories or some aspect of Mesoamerican cultures and their histories.
- Digital Storytelling, a Wikipedia introduction, with sections about its use in education
A model, from our point of view, for capturing short biographical stories, is found in Gabriela Martínez and Lynn Stephen’s project “Latino Roots.” During our institute, you can pick their brains about this project. They teach a course with this theme at the University of Oregon, and students who take the course end up making short documentaries based on interviews with Latinos in Oregon. If you go to this page, then click on the Course link, scroll down and click on a student project, you will see how these are steaming free using Vimeo:
Here are some more examples of digital storytelling with multicultural themes:
- “What are you?” / “Qué eres tú?” an exploration of self-identity, in English, by Jason Zapata Martínez, just under 4 mins.
- “Las ollas de mi suegra,” an exploration of self-identity, mostly in English, just under 5 mins.
Thousands of non-professional videos are uploaded to the Internet every year. Many of these involve digital storytelling. Here are some resources that offer tips for digital storytelling:
- Ten Common Video Storytelling Mistakes, by Adam Westbrook
- The Basics of Video Storytelling, from Social Media Today
- Mastering Multimedia: Video Storytelling, blog
There are so many resources on line for this type of project, we would love to have you suggest resources that we should list here. Please help us out.