Digital Story Blog Post: Point of View Explained

For this digital story, I created a short instructional video that explains the concept of Point of View in a clear and engaging way for my intended audience, which is my sixth grade ELA students. The goal of the video is to help students understand the basic differences between first person, third person limited, and third person omniscient. I used simple visuals and a friendly tone to make the lesson easy for middle school learners to follow.

For this assignment, I wanted to try something new. I use Canva often and have a premium account, but I have never used all the tools on the platform. I decided to experiment with the AI video generator along with the AI voiceover tool. Nearly all of the visuals in my video were generated through Canva AI based on my prompts. The only videos not generated by AI were the intro/outro with the school bus and the one video of the boy with his head down. Those videos were standard stock videos available to Canva users with a premium membership. The audio was created with the AI voiceover feature. The main challenge I faced was getting the AI-generated images to match the lesson content while still looking friendly to students. I also spent time choosing a voice that sounded natural and supportive.

This digital story demonstrates the personalization principle because the script uses a conversational tone that speaks directly to the learner. Clark and Mayer explain that students learn more when narration sounds human and personal instead of formal. They state that using a conversational style in multimedia lessons increases learners' sense of social presence because it feels like the instructor is speaking to them in a natural way. I used first-person and second-person language in lines such as “I want to help you understand” and “You will notice that” to support this idea.