Digital Story 1

What? This week we learned about digital stories. I was interested in seeing what a digital story was because I had seen clips of them in other classes. They looked like they would be very difficult to do and that they would take a long time to accomplish. I learned that digital stories are stories that are told with pictures. They have tell a story that may be emotionally catching. Something that will catch attention yet teach about the chosen subject as well. I was glad to see that it is something that I will be able to do. I am still a little bit nervous about doing it, I feel that I do not have much experience in doing voice overs and movie clips. It will be interesting to see what we come up with.

So what? Digital stories can be a great way of teaching a subject that may be hard to teach verbally or with any other form of instruction. The reason it would be a great is because a picture tells a thousand stories. I think anything students can look at will only help them to learn and understand better. It is good to show students visual aids to teach. If a student can learn by watching a movie, imagine how a student will learn watching nothing but facts about the subject they are trying to learn. I believe that a little effort can go a long way with students. It may take a lot of work to put a digital story together, but when it is all said and done the students will learn a great deal about the subject being taught. It brings emotions into learning, something that is hard to do otherwise. I felt some feelings toward the digital stories we saw in class, especially the one about Abraham Lincoln. Could there be any better way of teaching that particular subject? By actually hearing the address being read and seeing the pictures made the experience enjoyable for me. I learned a lot about that topic in the three minutes it played for.

Now what? I would like to say I will be a professional digital story creator, but I seem to take too long for things like that. I spend the whole unit making the thing and would still not have it done for the time I wanted to use it. I don't know how efficient it would be for me to try using it. I will borrow others, however, I do hope to use them because I see great learning potential in it. I will use the information we learn in class to better understand the creation process of a digital story, when I actually learn how to do one and if I am any good at it, I will use them in my future classrooms. If I was drawn into a story about Abraham Lincoln and learned so much in the minutes with that, I will surely use them in my classroom to show emotion and portray the use of feelings to aid in learning.

Video NASA Digital Story

I liked the digital story about NASA, I thought it was well prepared and had a lot of thought put into it. I did find myself thinking that the words were used too much in the story. I did like the part where he stopped talking and brought in Kennedy's speech. The flow of the audio went well with the pictures that were being presented. I liked it and I hope I will be able to do something compared to that in quality of work shown. I know more about the space program from watching this segment than my whole life of watching TV and listening to news and reading. It is affective and should be used in the classroom for sure.