Wow, what a week (or two) it has been. We've learned so much and the text, DigiTales, has demonstrated that the more we learn, the more we learn how much we don't really know. But it is nice to hear that we can only learn what is necessary. Beyond that, we will learn as we need to.
I've found that there are a lot of different elements to creating a digital story. The use of Animoto is awesome because of ease. I even had a class use it to show me some holiday photos this year and the posts are coming in like crazy. My students really like it and I've heard some of them say that they plan to use it outside of class. I think that is great, but once their membership runs out after 6 months, they'll have to get a free version. :)
Another aspect to telling stories in a digital world involve recording a voice over. This is where I am most afraid because my best stories involve feedback from my audience. In a digital story, the only feedback is that of your computer screen, which if you haven't noticed, isn't much at all.
Integrating pictures and images can be challenging as well, however the photo a day assignment was very useful in helping us take photos of things we wouldn't have seen before. It was sometimes difficult to post every day, but it was easy once I got onto the computer. I'm looking forward to finalizing our last project and finishing this course. It was fun and a lot of hard work went into creating these digital stories.
Hey Josh - great post! I, too, love using Animoto because it is just so quick & easy to do. I was helping some teachers upload pictures to their teacher webpages a few weeks ago, and it was taking FOREVER because we can only upload 5 pictures at a time before you have to save...and then start the process all over again. A few pictures into the process I realized it would be way faster and have a WAY cooler end product if instead of uploading the pictures to the teacher webpage we would make a movie with Animoto. That's exactly what we did, and it brought them to tears...literally.
ReplyDeleteWhen you talk about finalizing our last project, I'm assuming that you are talking about the pecha kucha? Have you decided what tool you are going to use to create the pecha kucha?
Josh - I also found it difficult to post a photo everyday. Most times, my photos built up for a few days and then I posted 4 or 5 days at one time. Not ideal, but, it is what it is. (That's my new favorite saying!)
ReplyDeleteI, too, liked taking the photos. It opened my eyes to different perspectives. Some of the photos I took were meaningless, but I took them simply because I was struck by the color contrast of the items in the photo.
Again, the voiceover was very scary for me. But after practicing on a few projects, I feel a little more confident and the sound of my voice doesn't gag me as much as it did before!