Guiding young students and older students, like us, while creating a digital story is of the utmost importance

in ensuring that the storytellers honor the listeners time and attention by telling a story that is interesting and engaging and that creates and resolves a state of expectation (Ohler, p. 94). Ohlers mention of honoring the listeners time and attention reminds me of Derrick Jensens rules of writing in his book, Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution. He explains to his college class on the second day of class: The first rule of writing is A chorus: Dont bore the reader. Good. The second rule of writing is: Dont bore the reader. Someone says, But thats Exactly, and the third rule of writing is: Dont bore the reader, now can anyone guess the fourth and fifth rules? (Jensen, p. 32). We have to show students how to explicitly not bore the reader and one way of doing this is by providing students with examples of mentor texts. For our digital storytelling projects we have a vast selection that we can find on YouTube, but for younger students, maybe, a more appropriate mentor text may be picturebooks. Young writers need to see a variety of examples of writing styles and picturebook provide an example of balance with text and pictures, just as their digital projects hopefully will mimic. Van Horn cites Nodelman (1991) who urges us to understand that readers of all ages will become more competent and adept at meaning making if they can recognize and manipulate what he calls the three potential stories of picture books: the ones in the pictures, the one in the words, and the one that results as the pictures and words are integrate or combined (Van Horn, p. 127). Showing students picturebooks with very observable ways that the pictures give meaning, the text give meaning, and how the combination of both the text and the pictures work together to create meaning would help clearly see how a digital story can be created with a balance of words and pictures. One picturebook that comes to mind is Anthony Brownes, Voices in the Park. You can read the book for free here. The elements that tell this story are the font, color, language, clothing, the names of the characters, and Im sure there are more that I havent yet noticed. While these would be difficult for students to see on their own it would be important to guide them in this discovery. In his chapter 3, Gee (2004) mentions how technologies can be good or bad, it all depends on the situation (p. 21). His example of watching television could be thought about in the same way as reading a book or watching a digital story. He says, When children watch television with an adult who gets them to think and talk about what they are watching, it can be good for the childrens cognitive growth (p 21). Children may not observe tiny details in pictures unless they were guided to see them by an adult. Once students understand how a story can be expressed using pictures and words, then they can begin thinking about creating their own digital stories. Ohler recommended having students create a story map to use as a road map during their DST creation. As I was reading this I was wondering if it would matter if students created a storyboard by drawing their story first, since drawing seems to come easier to some students (especially the younger, more reluctant writers), or if they should write out the details of their story and then do their drawing. As I continued to read on, Ohler recommended that, storyboards ensure that the sequence of events of a story makes sense, while story maps ensure that the sequence of events supports a story that is compelling and memorable (p. 103) and storyboards should not be the first planning tool you create because it does not facilitate sketching out the fundamentals of your story. For this,

we need some kind of story map (p. 103). While I believe in the majority of situations Ohler would be correct, I still think allowing very young writers to draw first might encourage them to think of more details that they may leave out of their writing. I think Ohler would agree with this statement because he writes, As always, it is up to teachers to describe the goals of a DST project and evaluate the results accordingly (p. 162). Jensen, D. (2011). Walking on water: Reading, writing, and revolution. White River Jct, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.