The best way to build empathy for other people is to listen, and I feel that one of the most engaging ways to do this is through authoring and publishing digital stories.

Most teachers have little experience with these types of projects, so I led a group of teachers on a trip to Guatemala this summer where they learned the art and technique of producing video documentaries.  Inspired by the Humans of New York blog, teacher participants interviewed the Mayan people of Guatemala to understand their lives and culture.

At the end of the trip, I produced an ebook that documents our experience, includes the finished projects, and details the lesson for the documentaries so you can do a similar project with your students.

I'm passionate about all kinds of storytelling and how the act of creating and publishing stories has the ability to open hearts and minds.  This article explores my ideas about storytelling and empathy and can give you a better sense of my philosophy of teaching and learning. It was written by Nicole Krueger for the ISTE member magazine, Empowered Learner in 2018.  See the full article below.  Photos by Allen Zaki.

This article was originally published in 2018 in PBS Teachers Lounge
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(Update: June 2025)
Educators need community more than ever, and one of my favorite ways to do this is by attending conferences.  They're also a great opportunity for professional growth, a way to be inspired, and yes, have fun! Some of my most inspirational professional growth has happened at conferences, and I’ve met some of my best friends by attending these events. After years of attending conventions as both a presenter and attendee, I thought I’d share a few tips about how to make the most of your conference experience.

1. Have realistic expectations.
​Conferences are the education equivalent of going to a big art museum. Expect to be inspired and sometimes overwhelmed with the amount of great ideas you encounter. Like museums, conferences have their own personalities and strengths, so attend those that compliment your style and goals. Also remember that, just like art, not every session will be your cup of tea.

2. Have a plan.
Read the conference program and use the mobile app in advance to get a mental map of the sessions, speakers and workshops. Determine your top “must see” sessions each day, and fill in with backups that would be nice to see if you have the time, or if one of your favorites is full.

3. How to choose sessions.
Titles may be deceptive. Look for presenters who have a track record or interesting background. Find sessions that help you address your weaknesses or goals, not what affirm what you already know. Find inspirational, challenging sessions that may be outside your wheelhouse to give you perspective. I’m not an administrator, but I have attended sessions on leadership and team building because I can use those skills with my students during collaborative projects.

4. Divide and conquer.
If you go with a group of colleagues, consider splitting up to see more sessions and share your notes with each other later. You can cover more ground and bring back more ideas that way.

5. Be an active participant.
Share great ideas and give shout outs to speakers and colleagues by posting on social media. Photos and quotes from speakers are great ways to do so. Use the convention hashtags and consider the great ideas you can share with colleagues around the world that couldn’t attend the conference.

6. Daily reflections
The day can be long and full of information. Spend a few minutes processing what you learned while the information is still fresh. Jot down notes and meet with colleagues for a debrief. Use this in your post-conference reflection (see number 10 below).

7. Conferences happen in the hallways.
Leverage the format of conferences: face to face interaction. Take time to meet colleagues you follow online, attend hosted meetups to connect with new people and expand your personal learning network, have conversations with speakers and meet with vendors.  It’s also the ideal time for you and colleagues to brainstorm and plan together without the burden of school routines--nothing is more conducive to innovation like a change of scenery.

8. The exhibit hall: workshops and demos instead of swag.
A quick sweep to pick up free swag is great, but your time is best spent if you can learn something new.  I only go to the exhibition hall for value added training sessions offered by the exhibitors. Learn new techniques, see the latest updates, and hear from educators who are using these tools in their learning space. Check the websites, newsletters and socials in advance to see a schedule of presentations. 
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9. Pace yourself
Being liberated from the kids, chores, and work is exciting and well-deserved, but there *might* be too much of a good thing! Hosted mixers, dinner with friends, and long days of walking and talking can take their toll. Be sure to stay hydrated, eat well, take breaks, and know your limits. If your hotel is close to the convention site, go back to rest and refresh before evening activities. Bring--and use--a reusable water bottle and healthy snacks.

10. After the conference.
Debrief with your colleagues (or yourself if attending alone) on the last day or in the airport going home.

• Rank the top concepts from the event and identify 2-3 actionable ideas that you can implement right away.  
• Follow up with speakers and colleagues you met at the conference to stay connected and maintain your PLN.
• Share what you learned and new ideas you have for your learning space on socials or a blog.

Following these tips can help you have a better conference experience. For more great insights into attending events, check out the free Little Black Guide To Conferences, from Joy Of Professional Learning.

This story first appeared in EdSurge

​When was the last time you wrote an essay? When was the last time you read one other than for grading?
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Now think about the frequency with which you read online articles, blogs, social media posts or listen to podcasts that inspire you or provide new information and perspectives. When did you last watch YouTube to figure out how to do something complicated, from cross stitch to car repair?
If you’re like me, you’ve done much of your reading and learning through some kind of digital publishing platform—because it’s easy, accessible and often free. Whether text, video or something else entirely, each of these mediums encompasses a form of writing.

The ubiquity and impact of digital writing can’t be ignored. Nearly 70% of Americans get some of their news from social media; world views—impacting presidential campaigns and more—are shaped by these platforms. Yet most high school and middle school students are illiterate when it comes to online texts, and can’t discern real information from fake news.
We can not omit digital literacy from our curriculum.

In addition learning how to read and consume digital texts, our students must know how to author and publish in the digital realm. What’s at stake is our students’ ability to become thoughtful citizens, and their ability to write and publish perspectives and information that will be crucial for their career success. The National Association for Media Literacy in Education has defined media literacy as being able to analyze digital texts as well as create them.

Redefining writing
We need to reframe our conversation about writing from one based on polarities of analog versus digital to one about purpose, passion and relevance. Just as the technological revolution of the printing press democratized the authorship and distribution of books, so too does social media and the internet allow for more voices to be heard and for a wide variety of authors—including our students—to connect with audiences around the world.

Increasingly, writing doesn’t mean a five paragraph essay written by hand. And although the medium used to write can take many forms other than words on paper, the foundations of good writing are the same in any platform—critical thinking and analysis, structure, voice, tone, and audience.

Like its analog predecessors, digital writing can be used in formative and summative assessments, non-fiction writing, and for creative self-expression. Authoring with multimedia such as video, photography and sound introduces an entirely new set of grammar and vocabulary, not just a new set of tools. Students become savvy consumers of information and ideas when they understand how the messages they encounter are created.

How to help your students evolve from analog to digital writers
Start with simple assignments that are an easy transition from what you and your students are already familiar with. Try blogging, then build to more complex projects like podcasting or video storytelling. In addition to concentrating on the ideas and the writing itself, try to create situations where the students’ writing takes advantage of the medium and the connectedness of the internet.

Some criteria I use to develop assignments include:

• student agency
• engagement and passion
• audience impact beyond the classroom
• authoring skills and experiences needed for success outside of academia
• collaboration and connectivity with other authors and audience members
• experiences authoring in a variety of media other than text

When we develop our writing assignments, we must ultimately come back to one main concern: purpose. Why are we giving specific types of writing assignments and how do they help our students convey their ideas in ways that resonate with their audience?

Resources on Writing for an Authentic Audience

•  A Guide to Producing Student Digital Storytellers, by Michael Hernandez
•  Create to Learn: Introduction to Digital Literacy, by Renee Hobbs
•  Evaluation Within Project-Based Learning, by Michael Hernandez

Social media: The haiku of digital writing
A great way to introduce students to online publishing is to use social media. It’s a familiar, relevant publishing platform and allows for quick access to a global audience. The brevity of the format (Twitter’s 280 characters, for instance) forces students to synthesize their ideas down to the essential story elements.

For example, Larry Reiff, a high school English teacher in New York, uses Twitter to teach his students about Shakespeare by having them tweet in the voice of characters. Students learn the literature through public performance, understand social media tools, and become better writers.

“Knowing that the whole world may see their work forces students to step up,” says Reiff. “They proofread a little bit more closely. They double check the punctuation. I soon as the students begin to post their work online, I noticed a gradual improvement in their writing.”

Journalism students use Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat to publish news, becoming familiar with the platform’s immediacy and how to connect with audiences through tagging and mentions. Social media relies heavily on an awareness of voice and audience. Each social media app has a slightly different demographic, and the nature of a scrolling feed means that publishing content demands an awareness of timing and when audience members will see posts.

Blogging: The online magazine
An online publication can have one or many writers, developing assignments around student-selected themes. Digital ‘zines can include expository and persuasive writing, each involving research, interviews, and analysis. Narrative writing is a great way to integrate creative writing in the form of short story or poetry, and is the next step in the publication of literary magazines.

Because blog entries are published on websites, they can easily incorporate photography, infographics, and embedded video. This is a great way to scaffold all elements of digital literacy, as student assignments become increasingly complex and build digital literacy skills over the course of the school year.

The best part about digital writing is that it is also its own portfolio. Because student-published work lives online—not in a file cabinet—it is easily collected into a resume with hyperlinks, or a Storify best-of collection of social media posts. Resumes are their own type of story, carefully curated for each employer (target audience) who is looking for a specific set of skills.

A picture is worth 1000 words: Video and multimedia writing
While scripts and interview questions form the foundation for multimedia projects, the real communication going on here is with the images themselves. Visual literacy, the understanding of and use of images to convey information, is where writing is headed.

Facebook predicts that in a few years the majority of posts to its site will be video. What’s more, the presence of photos and video on social media posts increases audience interaction significantly. If one of our main purposes for writing is to have an impact on an audience, then this is going to be the best way to go.

Podcasts and explainer videos have taken off in popularity because they’re relevant, packed with information, and are easy for a global audience to access. Explainer videos also let you assess student knowledge in a way that is dynamic and actually useful for an audience beyond the classroom. Rather than an essay or multiple choice test, students create videos to demonstrate their knowledge. After all, the best way to learn is to teach.
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With a grammar all its own, video is so much more than recorded plays. Using visual evidence in documentaries and journalism is the ultimate skill for learning expository and persuasive writing. It can also be used to teach a variety of literary devices through creative visual storytelling.
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As teachers, our goal is to instill a love for writing in our students, to get them to write in all of its forms, and prepare them to communicate ideas effectively to an audience in the real world. When we teach our students to write for digital media, it sends a message that our assignments are relevant, exciting and important.

By telling their stories through multimedia, students develop skills in critical thinking, writing, research, and collaboration, as well as owning their learning and effecting change.

This story first appeared in Edutopia.

​​Perceptions of people and events are very much dependent upon who you are and what your experience has been. Events in Ferguson and Baltimore, among others, highlight our misunderstandings of each other, and how the same facts can be interpreted entirely differently. What's worse, people of color and underrepresented groups are defined by journalists covering these events, who themselves don't reflect the ethnic composition of our country as a whole.

​Recent studies have proven that stories can change perceptions and even make people more tolerant. Rather than wait to be defined by others, it's important that students learn to create understanding by sharing their story, their worldview, their concerns, and their triumphs with others.

Groups like Youth Radio empower teens in poor and minority-majority neighborhoods to become multimedia journalists. Kids in these programs learn how to tell and share their own stories with a local or national audience.

No matter your class demographics or grade level, ELA and social studies teachers should integrate similar projects in their own classrooms, because every student will benefit from learning to craft a compelling visual story backed by persuasive facts and ideas.

What Is Multimedia Storytelling?

Students use video, audio, photography, web, and social media to craft documentaries and nonfiction stories about the world around them. These interdisciplinary projects allow students to focus on creating an authentic product that many people outside the classroom and their neighborhoods will see.

Why Produce Multimedia Stories?

Multimedia storytelling is a perfect match for Common Core curriculum, so we can finally feel confident about integrating it into our classes. There are many benefits to these kinds of projects.

• Producing these stories develops critical thinking and writing skills.
• Digging up information about a topic and people to interview hones research skills.
• Reporting and conducting interviews helps develop public speaking and interpersonal skills.
• Allowing students to choose topics they're passionate about allows them to take ownership of their learning.
• Considering other perspectives and your work's impact on an audience helps address ethical decision making.
• Producing the videos develops collaboration and time-management skills.
• Stories can actually have an impact on students' communities and effect change.

How to Do It
Mobile devices make it possible to author and share video stories and documentaries with a global audience, and to have an impact on society. Most students have access to a smartphone or tablet, and many tools for authoring video and social media stories are free. There are even some free lesson plans for multimedia journalism, video, and photography that teachers can use to empower students right away.

Begin by having a discussion with your students about misperceptions that outsiders might have about their community and themselves. Then flip it and consider what misperceptions your students have about others. This is a great opportunity to find out how and why we end up with the wrong idea about others.

1. Make a list of all the good things about your school or neighborhood that outsiders don't know about.
2. Make a list of all of the bad things about your school or neighborhood that need to be fixed or changed.
3. Working individually or in teams, have students choose one of the items from either list as the subject of their project.
4. Determine the medium you'd like your students to use: video documentaries, audio podcasts or stories, text, social media, etc.

​Producing Your Stories
Audio documentaries are easy to do with services like Soundcloud and the new Story Corps app. Many of the same techniques apply to video documentaries, so it might be helpful to begin with audio and move to video.

Making video documentaries is complex and takes a lot of time, so scaffold the projects to make the process enjoyable, and you'll end up with a product the students can be proud of. Begin with class exercises and learn from mistakes before you go out into the real world.
Steps in the Process:

1. Conduct research and identify people to interview.
2. Develop questions for these sources and practice interview skills.
3. Start with an interview-only project to learn which questions give the most interesting responses.
4. Shoot B-roll footage that illustrates what your interviewees are talking about as they lead their lives, work, or interact with others.
5. Through editing, combine the interviews with B-roll.
6. Repeat.

Publishing Your StoriesAudio stories can be hosted for free on Soundcloud, and hosted automatically if you conducted interviews using the StoryCorps app. Video projects are best when hosted on YouTube and Vimeo, although many schools block these sites from their networks. Consider creating a teacher account on these sites so that you can upload student work separately.

Adobe Spark Page is a great app that allows you to combine video, photos and text in an interactive gallery viewable on any web browser, so this might be a good solution if you have limited access to video hosting sites.

Social media is also a great way to publish and share your completed work. Share links via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or your favorite network. The projects have an impact only if others see them, so publicize and let parents and community members see their stories.

General Tips

• Ideas are the most important part, so spend time developing unique, narrow topics.
• Find colorful interview subjects with unique points of view.
• Writing is the core skill of any multimedia project, including interview questions, story structure, and voice overs.
• Less is more. Keep the projects short and to the point, or you run the risk of being overwhelmed with information and video footage.
• Develop community buy-in. Get your administrators excited about empowering students. Encourage neighborhood leaders to participate in projects that will get their message heard by others.
• Embrace your mistakes. There will be plenty of them, so learn from each one and make the next project better. Just attempting these projects has already made the world a better place.

Multimedia stories are fun challenges for your students and empower them to share their ideas and concerns with the wider world. We owe them the opportunity to become multimedia literate and to develop the courage it takes to have an impact on society.