What happens when you give a bad guitar player a bigger amplifier?

Excerpted from Jason's new book, Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning and Creativity...

Revelation #6: What happens when you give a bad guitar player a bigger amplifier? If you don't have a good story to tell, using technology to tell it will just make that more obvious.

While I have welcomed the increased expression that the evolution of graphic, audio-video and other tools have brought to digital storytelling students, many years ago I realized something very interesting: as the technology became stronger, some of my students' stories became weaker. Some students seemed to have an intuitive grasp of using new technology powerfully and artfully, while others didn't.

In fact, for them the "story" part of their digital stories were getting worse.

It became my goal many years ago as a digital storytelling teacher to make sure that I was not enabling the technophile at the expense of the storyteller in my students.