Week 15: Digital Stories and PhotoStory

What?

This week we learned more about digital stories and specifically how to use PhotoStory in this process. PhotoStory is free to download and is very easy to use. It allows you to edit your pictures with things such as red-eye, cropping, highlighting, rotating, black and white, etc. You can also make transitions between each picture, such as panning in and out. I was surprised to learn that you can also work with music on this program. You can upload mp3's of songs that have already been created, or you can make your own music through Photo Story. It has several options and varieties to mix and match with in order to find the style of music you need to match your story. My group is doing our digital story on manualism and oppression of Deaf people.

So What?

Digital stories can be a very effective way of catching students' attention, involving multiple learning styles, creating interest, and giving a basic introduction of the topic students will be learning about. Because there are free and easy tools available such as Photo Story, ditigal stories are a very practical and fun thing for teachers to create for lessons. It does not have to be limited to only teachers, though. Many students would have a great time creating their own digital stories, and would learn a lot from that assignment. Digital stories are a fun way to learn and should definitely be incorporated into classroom instruction where possible.

Now What?

I plan on brainstorming about lessons and units in my curriculum that would benefit the most from incorporating a digital story. I'd like to use a couple digital stories throughout the semester because they are interesting, captivating, have good information and images, and help create diversity in lessons. I would also like to brainstorm about ways to assign a digital story project to my students. It would be fun to let them pick a topic relating to the Deaf community, culture, or ASL that they want to learn more about. Once they approved their topic, they could work in groups to create a digital story about that topic to present to the class. This assignment would involve many different learning styles, be flexible enough to match the students' interests, let them be creative and unique, and be an assignment that is different from the ones they typically have to do.

Video: Did You Know 3.0
This was a very interesting video for me. Before seeing some of these videos that we have been assigned to watch this semester, I had no idea how much the world uses and depends on technology. I knew that it's basically how we live today, but I had no real idea of the numbers or how to visually and concretely imagine such an impact. The following are some of the facts the video mentioned that really surprised me and helped me understand what an impact technology has had in the world:

- The top 10 in-demand jobs for 2010 didn't even exist in 2004
- Today the number of text messages sent and received every day exceeds the population of the entire planet
- For students starting a 4 year technical degree, half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their 3rd year of study

The video really made me think when it said how we are currently developing technology to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet. We are training students for jobs and technologies that don't even exist yet. We are progressing so much, that it is almost overwhelming to think of the things to come. There seems to be no limits anymore. It's exciting, and it makes me want to keep up on the latest technologies in order to know at least as much as my students will know, and be able to use those technologies and tools in the classroom.