Digital Storytelling

My Digital Life
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG62Mka_OmE


Producing a digital story of my life was pretty challenging. That was one of the reasons I chose myself as the subject of my first attempt at a digital story. I also saw that some of the most amusing pictures that I had were ones from the past proving what a dork I was growing up. I found that I ended up focusing on the part of my life I remember most fondly and they seemed to work well with explaining who I am. What I found most challenging about this was locating all of the pictures that I wanted to use and then figuring out how much time I needed the photo displayed while I was narrating, but being able to record my narration while I was watching the clips allowed me to see how much time the photo had left on the screen made the narration easy on the iMac I Have at home with the built in microphone. Never any 'connection' problems with audio because when there's no line out detected, the iMovie program automatically uses the internal microphone.

I also made a digital story about me because I wanted to give it is an option to my students at the beginning of next year. I always have them write an essay about who they are and what they're interested in, sometimes students would even make collages and picture books, but this would be a perfect way for them to both work with new and emerging technology, but also have to constantly be writing and rewriting text is an excellent way to tie in an original class-created document into their everyday classwork. Most of my students may need help in learning how to use the tools to create a digital story, but between me and my students who would outdo me x10 (the geek I hug every week) the students who really wanted to learn how to do this would find a way to learn from me or a peer.  

I taught a recent lesson on mood and tone in photography to my students, and studying about digital storytelling made me want to watch all the Ken Burns PBS documentaries that I could find, and ending up showing each class a great 24 minute clip about his Nation Parks series (http://video.pbs.org/video/1132712651/) to find all the students amazed at what a photograph can convey. I think that digital storytelling would be a great way for students to express who they are to me as well as their classmates at the start of next school year. The most important part of this learning experience for me was in seeing the amount of time that it took some of the programs to 'upload' images and video especially. It took hours for youtube to import my file but I wanted to use you tube to host the video because it's now attached to my google account.