Thing 19-Digital Storytelling

Photostory 3 is simple and very intuitive to use. I attended a NetTrekker workshop and they covered Photo Story 3 as well. It was quite interesting how simple the program is to use and yet how professional the final product looks.

Digital Storytelling can be used in the classroom to help reinforce a topic and allow the students to be the teacher. The students could be given a topic and a length requirement and they would need to make a "story" depicting what they know about the topic. If a digital projector is available in the classroom, the digital story could be displayed and the other students could take notes to help them learn the topic as well. Once students get to play with transitions, images, videos and music to make a digital story, they will be engaged. Another way digital storytelling can be used in the classroom is to showcase students' creativity. Some students are shy and not comfortable in group work on talking in front of their peers. If they are able to tell their story through images, music, text, and narration they may be very comfortable and excel beyond the teacher's expectations. Those timid students will be able to express themselves and thus, hopefully evoke a discussion regarding the topic they are teaching. By using digital storytelling, all learning styles should be conformable. The visual and kinesthetic learners will be comfortable using the tools of the program hands-on, the auditory learner will be able to include music and narration to teach what they know.

The link to my Face of the Classroom site is: http://21thingsforthe21stcentury.weebly.com/

Digital Storytelling incorporates the higher level thinking we want to evoke from our students using Bloom's Taxonomy. Students can take their learning from concrete and static by using pen and paper to analysis and synthesis where students are generating and creating a product by connecting their ideas with the tools of the software. What more could a teacher want!? After creating my HTML photostory,  I showed my high school accounting students. Obviously, they are not the ones who are learning HTML. I just wanted to get their input since the information would be something totally new and different to them.

They are seniors so of course, they thought the music was boring and they wanted me to upload something "cooler." Most were fixated on the music and thought it wasn't necessary to have music because they were distracted by it.  The said the transitions were cool and it looked neat how they panned in different directions to keep their attention. They thought there was too much information in such a short 2-minute period so they were happy I threw in some pictures to break it up a little. Overall, they thought the HTML students would think it's a good attention-grabber to start the HTML unit, then each section could be expanded on as I progressed through each section. I agreed :-)