Week 13- Digitial Story intro

What?
This week we began learning about digital stories. Specific aspects of digital storytelling that we learned about were scripting, narration, storyboards, and the impact that music and images can have in creating emotion and catching attention. Scripting should be done carefully and work effectively with the images used. Music should enhance and emphasize. Storyboards are a good way to get started and organized while creating a digital story. We watched some examples of good digital stories. The one about the Holocaust created a lot of emotion in the class due to the powerful images and music involved. We will be creating our own three minute digital story as groups in our specific content areas.

So What?
Digital stories are great to use in the classroom for many reasons. First of all, they can be wonderful hooks for a lesson or beginning of a new unit. Those brief three minutes can contain a great overview, create real images for students to relate to, cause interest, and begin the questioning and discussion process with students. Digital stories can also reach all kinds of different learners. Visual learners will benefit from the images and words shown, musical and auditory learners will appreciate the music used to emphasize the story, and logic-based students will learn a lot from the facts presented in the story. Hands-on students, ESL students, or others with different needs may really be able to enjoy and excel in making their own digital stories. Overall, digital stories have a lot to offer for our diverse students and their many personalities, interests, situations, and learning styles.

Now What?
My students are living in a world with so much technology and would benefit greatly from having opportunities to use this 21st century technology in their learning and my classroom. As I haven't had any experience with digital storytelling up to this point, it seems a bit intimidating to me. In order to feel more confident in this area, I plan on working hard with my group on this project to make it the best it can be. Collaborating and using the tutorials and examples to guide us will help us learn what we need to do. With practice, I know that I will be able to feel comfortable creating digital stories for my future students. It will be nice for both me and them to have an "out of the box" assignment that adds variety and interest to class. I'm excited to get started!


Video: NASA Digital Story
I thought this digital story gave good information and basic knowledge of what NASA has done, including their accomplishments and losses. I liked having the audio and images of the President's speeches about our goal of landing on the moon because it made it more real to me. Hearing his voice rather than the narrator made more of an impact and impression. The music also played a big part for me, specifically when the story talked about those who had lost their lives. At that point, the music changed to a slower and more respectful feel. The trumpet felt patriotic. It matched the mourning and respect that the world felt for the loss of those lives. The pictures of these individuals helped create emotion in me because I saw that they were real people. I wasn't as disconnected as I would have been had I just heard the narrator tell about them.