Meridian Stories Digital Storytelling Challenges
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The Why and The Who
Meridian Stories offers teachers and students the opportunity to creatively develop and produce short digital stories about core curricula in Language Arts, History and STEAM. Founded in 2011, Meridian Stories is one vital solution to the problem of how to integrate the wonders and complexities of digital literacy into the classroom. For students, the digital realm is their library. It’s their communication platform. It’s their social life. It’s their source of knowledge. It’s their language. It’s a full-blown communication spectrum the breadth and depth of which is unprecedented in history.
Scene from DASH from the The Game’s Afoot Challenge
How do we best prepare our kids to be meaningful contributors to this digitally literate universe in order to succeed post formal education?
Meridian Stories is part of the answer.
The What
BEGIN by downloading any one (or all!) of these six Digital Storytelling Challenges: full three to four week projects with guidance from start to finish, including an evaluation rubric, standards correlations, essential questions and student proficiencies.
Digital Storytelling Resource Centers
Looking for more SUPPORT for how your student will research, develop, create, and produce their curricular-driven digital stories? Explore below!
Artists & Innovators
Artists and Innovators is a series of short videos that feature experts in the field of media, creativity, production and the performing arts, talking about their craft.
Creative How-To Guides
The Creative How-To Guides are a series of short documents that are designed to provide the students with guidance about creating stories inside of various media formats.
Production How-To Guides
The Production How-To Guides are a series of short documents and video tutorials that are designed to provide the students with some creative and logistical guidance about media production.
Game & Animation How-To Guides
The Game and Animation How-To Guides are a series of short documents that are designed to provide the students with guidance about utilizing gaming and animation techniques in digital storytelling.
Digital Rules Center
The Digital Rules Center is a series of short documents that are designed to provide the students with clear guidance about the rules for using content — music, video, pictures and text — that is other than your own, inside of your Meridian Stories digital story.
Check Out the Book
Brett Pierce, the Founder and Executive Director of Meridian Stories, puts digital storytelling into your hands in his new book from Heinemann, Expanding Literacy: Bringing Digital Storytelling into Your Classroom.
How can we make meaningful, thoughtful digital storytelling a standard, best practice in schools? Expanding Literacy offers a specific project-based learning angle that can be meshed with any traditional and non-traditional curricular topic and is flexible enough to be applied to almost any content area.
Meridian Stories Challenges
Language Arts
Short Story to Theatrical Glory
In this Challenge, we ask student teams to act out a short story of your (or your teacher’s) choice and record it on video. The twist is that the staging must be minimalist. Using the dramatist Samuel Beckett as our model, the teams are encouraged to use color selectively, a bare stage setting with minimal props, and no more than three actors plus a narrator (if desired). In short, to communicate what your team has deduced your story means with only the theatrical necessities. Each team has a maximum of 4 minutes to communicate– through staging, dialogue, and narrative description– the story and its essence. We recommend that the script use approximately 50% from the language of the author and 50% your words.
Meridian Stories Challenges
Language Arts
Mythological Photographic Storyboard
This Challenge asks you to explore the myths of cultures other than Greece and Rome – Egypt, Ireland, Scandinavia, Babylon, Native America and China for example. Then, re-tell this myth in a fully–produced, twelve-panel storyboard comprised of photographs that your team has taken. By ‘fully-produced,’ we mean that the media production must pay close attention to key literary elements such as character, setting, tone and plot.
Meridian Stories Challenges
History
Sports Casting History
Imagine being a sportscaster, reporting live, based on images being streamed to you from a GoPro camera on Paul Revere’s hat? Fun, right? What if you were there in 1521 in what is now Germany as Martin Luther confronted the Roman Catholic Church about his ‘reformed’ views of the Church? Or a sportscasting fly-on- the-wall as Jefferson negotiated the Louisiana Purchase? How about at the Soviet dacha in 1991 preparing to sign the Belavezha Accords, dissolving the Soviet Union?
In this Challenge, your team must pick a key moment in history – one which did not happen in public, like the landing on the moon in 1969 — and create a verbal, play-by-play account of the action, with a broadcaster and color commentator. The final deliverable should include the use of still photos, drawings and/or actual footage (historical recreations, if desired), intercut with shots of the sportscasters.
Meridian Stories Challenges
History
Forgotten Female Heroes
Understanding history is essential to creating progress, as individuals and as a society, but what if parts of that history are missing? This is a common problem when it comes to a woman’s place in history; women are underrepresented or forgotten, yet their accomplishments are equally as important as their male counterparts. This Challenge asks you to research an important woman in history and communicate that information about her in a simple, but fun game show format – tentatively titled, “What Did I Do?” – followed by a short biographical documentary. Lots of research. Lots of fun. Lots to learn.
Meridian Stories Challenges
STEAM
Green Monsters
The Project: Climate change is a very real issue facing our world today, but it seems like not enough people are doing their part to help combat rising carbon emissions and other pollutants plaguing our ecosystems. How do we get people to start caring—to start doing their part? Well, one way is to start introducing the ideas of climate stewardship to a young age, like 6 to 10-year olds. What if we were able to frame the perpetrators and combatants of climate change as antagonists and protagonists? As bad guys vs. good guys? This frame of reference is something young kids are able to understand.
Meridian Stories Challenges
STEAM
Water Corruption: Special News Report
The Project: Your town’s public drinking water supply is being threatened and there is a crisis. Your challenge is to create a television news segment investigating the crisis and what can be done. Here is what your team needs to do:
- research your municipal water supply;
- identify the greatest real potential threat to your water (how vulnerable is your water supply?);
- now assume the threat is happening, and a crisis is unfolding; and
- create a 2 – 4 minute Special TV News Report about this crisis that features your news team covering the events taking place.
The focus of this news report will be on short-term consequences and then an analysis at what could have been done to anticipate and prevent this disaster. In the end, this Challenge asks your students to assess the local measures in place to keep your community’s water supply safe and clean.
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