Thing 19: Digital Storytelling Reflection

Digital storytelling has several great ways it could be used in my classroom. I could use photographs and captions to create a sequence of images related to story problems that students work out. Having students see the step wise progression of solving a problem through pictures would help them to connect the non-linguistic representations of math and science to the concrete problem solving algorithms. Using digital story telling to create mnemonics for problem solving would be another great use. Having students create their own digital stories to show how they solved a question would give them yet another way to see the similarities and differences between how they solved a question and how another student solved a question.

So far the feedback I have received on my project has been positive and points to creativity in my creation. This was helpful in that it was reassuring but I would like more creative critique next time.  This thing was probably the most intense learning curve for me of the entire set of Things because first I had to create a storyboard with succinct ideas that I wanted to get across in my story. Then I had to find pictures that conveyed this idea that were copy-right free or could be used under a Creative Commons license. I made great use of http://pics.tech4learning.com/ , http://www.morguefile.com/archive , and www.flickr.com . As I consider my project there are two things that I would like to edit, now that I have completed the project. With the captions, sometimes the colored background used to separate the caption from the underlying photo weren’t big enough. Next time I would either edit my captions to be much smaller or figure out a way to make the colored background larger. Also I had found a piece of music that I really liked however it wasn’t quite long enough for my presentation. I cut and pasted the pieces together but the transition from the end of the first loop and the second loop is very distinct. Having used Movie Maker for the first time, I think my next uses of Movie Maker will be better and I can play more with other features.