The advent of digital technology has enhanced the power of stories to reach broader audiences across disciplines and beyond. Digital stories serve many purposes such as showing us patterns and common themes, helping us to make connections, and empowering current and future generations. Digital narratives foster building communities that might go beyond that of the storyteller.
In the context of our project, digital storytelling serves as a powerful way to promote engaged experiential learning and interdisciplinary connections by drawing upon digital literacies and tools to inform, instruct, and inspire. We utilize a place-based approach to celebrating and communicating our students’ successes while compiling pedagogical and interactive material for future educational use.
Below are included the digital tools that our team utilized to craft the digital narrative of This is Our Classroom
ArcGIS Online & StoryMaps
ArcGIS allowed us to contextualize the geographic locations of excursions, activities, and team presentations with mapping software. Using StoryMaps powered through ArcGIS, we embedded our geographic data and coordinates with textual descriptions and images to create walking tours and an experience for our visitors. This visualized and interactive platform
Adobe
We used Adobe Portfolio to house our materials. For editing our images and videos embedded with this Adobe Portfolio and our Story Maps, we made use of Adobe Creative Cloud apps such as Lightroom and Adobe Rush.
PressBooks
Pressbooks provided an openly accessible platform to focus on distributing the pedagogical materials for future use such as group charters and itineraries.