Your final project will be in form of digital artifact.
Your digital project will allow you to explore topics that we have studied in this course, or topics that are in connection with the theme of the course. Using a digital format will give you the opportunity to integrate a variety of media in your project and to be creative. The digital is, in itself, multimodal and will offer you the opportunity to express your understanding of material, themes, authors,movements, through different approaches and modalities.
What is a digital artifact?
A digital artifact is something that is designed to be experienced on the web. It will contain:
- Two or more of: text, image, sound, video, links.
- It will be easy to access and view online.
How I am going to realize it?
Your digital artifact should be published somewhere on the web which is publicly accessible. For your assignment, you will submit a link to your artifact and you will also give and receive feedback from peers on the course.
To serve as a guideline, please make sure your digital project includes the following 7 Elements of Digital Storytelling (Center for Digital Storytelling, Berkley, CA):
You are free to be as creative as you’d like, and are encouraged to use any of the digital media tools listed below. Make sure to download the rubric to cover all points in your presentation.
- Prezi – Prezi is a whole new way to present material in a way that makes a huge impact. It is cloud-based, so you can access and edit your presentation on the web. [Tutorial]
- Storify – Storify users tell stories by collecting updates from social networks, amplifying the voices that matter to create a new story format that is interactive, dynamic and social. [Tutorial]
- Storybird – Storybirds are short, art-inspired stories you can make and share on any device. [Tutorial]
- Voicethread – Voicethread allows you to combine various media that you can record into and comment on. [Guide]
- Thinglink – Create rich images with music, video, sound, text & more.
Share and discover deeper stories through images. [Tutorial] - Glogster – Mix Web, Images, Text, Music and Video. [Tutorial]
- You can of course make a movie and incorporate any media in it, including your own voice and your narrative presence producing a video-essay.
These tools are helpful to create content (software for items to be used in the presentation softwares above).
- Wordle – A toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. [Tutorial]
- Tagxedo – Turns words – famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters – into a visually stunning word cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text. [Tutorial]
- iMovie – Video editing software available on all Macs on campus. [Tutorial]
- Animoto – Show your photos and videos in a quick and elegant manner. You will be able to create 30 second videos only (unless you pay for the upgrade). [Tutorial]
- Videoscribe – Often called Whiteboard animation or sometimes Fast Drawing, VideoScribe replicates the stop-motion capture style of drawing that’s so popular on commercials at a fraction of the cost. [Tutorial]
- GoAnimate – Another online video editing platform. [Tutorial]
- PicResize – Resizes a single or multiple image.
Once you have created your digital project, please post it on this page so that we can all see and comment.
- Title the post with the name of your project.
- In the post, give a short 4 – 5 sentence summary about your project. Beneath it, paste your link to your digital project.
- Some of your peers will leave a comment on your post to give constructive feedback on what you did well and how you can improve your project.
- Your project will be graded using this rubric. You may download it to help you as you plan your project.
What should be the content?
There is a lot of flexibility in the content of this project. You should identify a topic of your interest and explore it. Here you can find some suggestions:
Mental illness in Italy (you could consider poetry and songs on this topic)
Education in Italy (reforms and changes)
Italian family (divorce, the new family)
The condition of workers in Italy – unions
Aldo Moro – you could look at his letters and integrate them into the context of what we have read and studied
Il movimento femminista in Italia
Here are also a few films that you might want to consider to expand your research:
Marazzi, Vogliamo anche le rose
Bellocchio, Buongiorno Notte,
Luccheti, Mio fratello è figlio unico
And certainly…i cento passi
When is the deadline for submission?
Sunday, November 9th at midnight
How do I evaluate my peers’ projects?
These are the criteria you will use to evaluate the digital projects:
- The digital artifacts clearly addresses the proposed subject
- Connections to the theme of the course are made clear
- The choice of media is effective and appropriate to the message
- The digital artifact stimulates a reaction in the peers.
- The digital artifact proposes a unique perspective
Try to have fun with this and use it as a chance to think broadly and creatively