One of this week’s reading was Nilsson (2010): Developing Voice in Digital Storytelling through Creativity, Narrative and Multimodality. The paper takes a look at a successful experience of 9 years old Simon utilizing multimedia and narratives in digital storytelling – and the authors take the stance that digital storytelling became a resource facilitating students’ creativity generally and creative literacy and literary development in particular.

Literacy in educational contexts is most often approached as a motor skill and not as a complex social, cultural and creative activity (Cole, 1996; Gee, 2008)

This idea presented in this chapter really made a storm inside my head. I as a world language teacher, can’t remember how many times I told my students, that "follow this pattern….use this vocabulary…make your writing look higher level…." Some of my students are good at taking test, even get 4 out of 5 for AP Chinese, but they are still struggling with everyday oral communication and having difficulty with some daily tasks, such as booking a hotel from a Chinese website, reading an authentic menu from a restaurant or discussing a social issue in depth.

This statement reminds me of the ultimate goal of world language learning: Our kids want to become communicative! Most of them signed up my class were to hope to learn the skills to express their feelings and opinions. They want to be able to narrate in details and understand other culture.

On the other hand, I also realized the connection between this statement and the ongoing shift in the world language department of my school. My school has continuously adjusted the grading rubric to align with the new pedagogy in the past few years.   "Homework" and "Effort" used to play a big part in students’ grade. But a change has been gradually shifted into the scoring system where teachers are more looking at the proficiency level of the students. We are now paying more attention on how well students respond to real life questions and communicate in the way  culturally appropriate. This shift certainly also changed the way our teachers designed classroom activities.

In a very simplified example, if one of my students spelled the vocabulary wrong , but the meaning of the whole sentence he/she was making was not impaired, this minor mistake will not cause their grade drop. Also, if a student didn’t fully understand a word in the sentence but he/she is able to guess the general ideas of the paragraph. That also is considered to be Okay. We made this change because we would like our students not be afraid of making mistakes and know the essence of learning a second language is to understand others and to be understood by others. We would like to encourage students to make meanings in any format they feel comfortable with, no matter it is in written or spoken or body language or all of them.

spread what they have learned to others through informal learning experiences outside of the classroom.