Digital Story 3

What? This week we have continued work on our digital story. We continued to plan the outline and collected pictures and this week we collected pictures with the advanced search. This means we were able to upload images which were labeled for reuse. Not all of the pictures were still available from our first attempt at the digital story, but with time and searches we were able to find many good images to use. It was really fun to explore all of the different images and find the right one for each slide. There is such a variety it makes it fun to look, I enjoyed this part.

So What? I first made the digital story using the movie maker on my computer. It worked great and the pictures and sound were awesome. However, we ran into a problem when we discovered we needed to narrate our digital story also. We discovered it wasn’t easy to add narration to the movie maker. The movie maker gave you the option to have narration or music, but not together. So that wouldn’t work for our digital story. So from that point I started over using the photo story program. It was a good program which I’d used in creating my first vidcast. I did have some problems uploading to YouTube, but after several days of work I was able to correctly upload and publish to YouTube. It was a good experience and made me stressed for a few days, but I am able to understand the process now, and I really like the informational digital stories we have created.

Then What? I am very excited to use this information digital story during my field experience. Our supporting teacher gave us the assignment to teach the students about Utah Geography-so this movie will be perfect. I look forward to using this tool in my teaching. It gives us the ability to present information in an interesting, fun and informative way. I still believe a picture is worth a thousand words, and I feel that visually teaching our students is another way we can help our students build schema and understand the ideas we are presenting. I have loved working with photo story and movie maker and now I understand the pro’s and con’s of each different program. Movie maker has great images and music, and photo story is much easier to add narration and music to. I have enjoyed this learning experience—but it did add a few white hairs to my head trying to understand the uploading issues.