Week 1: Assessment of Digital Storytelling Series

As part of the coursework in my Learning with Digital Stories class at the University of Colorado Denver, I will produce a series of weekly critiques that examine and review a digital story.

Overview

For my first critique, I’ve chosen a digital story from Youtube titled “Fowl Play - Simon's Cat”. Simon's Cat is an animated cartoon and book series by the British animator Simon Tofield featuring a hungry house cat who uses increasingly heavy-handed tactics to get its owner to feed it.I have used this video in my language classroom to promote Chinese speaking as it has no English narration and subtitle in this video and also length is only one minute long.

Assessment:

Since it is my first time to do the digital storytelling assessment, I am glad that my professor offers Ohler’s assessment traits list as reference. The three traits that I decided to use are:

1. Originality, voice, creativity

2. Flow, organization and pacing

3. Sense of audience

Story

How well did the story work? This trait can address structure, engagement, character transformation or any of the other qualities of story discussed in Part II. I think the story is well told, even though it is a quite simple story and only contains two characters. The story managed to include a beginning, a middle and an ending. It has taken into account of when, where, who, what, why and how. It has given the audience a sense of feeling towards the personality of the main characters. I would give the video an 9 out of 10 for this category.

Flow, organization and pacing

Was the story well organized? Did it flow well, moving from part to part without bumps or disorientation? I definitely think this video has a smooth flow. the scenes transitioned seamlessly. Given the fact that this video is only one minute long, it did a good job illustrating a complete story without rushing through. It takes time to describe how the cat feels when he first saw the turkey and what solutions that he came up with to solve his problem. I would give 9 out 10 for this category.

Sense of audience

How well did the story respect the needs of the audience? I would imagine the majority audience of this videos are young children and their caregivers. I think this video did a very good job in terms of this criteria. The content is age-appropriate. It contains the topics that many people feel related to: pets and holidays. This story could be watched and understood by everyone even if this person is not from an English -speaking country. This video can used to teach kids some important vocabulary for teachers and parents, such as "hide", "want" " hungry", "sad", "strange" etc. I would give 10 out of 10 for this category.

#ILT5340DigitalStorytelling