Digital StoryTelling Reflection

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There really is a better video reflection at: http://youtu.be/1fhPB45cp4c, but this blog site is not accepting any uploads or imports for some reason.

I really enjoyed creating the digital story about my life as a teacher-in-denial. It was fun to collect the photos, and think about a story line that would string them together. I used an old camera phone for some of the pictures, but I really didn't like the quality, and my bluetooth connections were unreliable...it is funny how you get accustomed to seeing beautiful, popping, living color, and instant technology success and response. I have been thinking about getting an iPhone, so I asked my sister if I could borrow hers for awhile. She was very generous and actually let me use it for a couple of days. I played with putting the photos into iMovie and working with that...no big deal there, and I didn't feel like I was gaining any particular new skills doing that, so I went with VoiceThread.

VoiceThread is a lot of fun, and I think the kids would really enjoy it. It might even be worth the subscription cost...it is that easy to use. Phoning in the audio LOOKED easy, and was, but the VT tutorial showed it being done with a landline. When I pressed my cellphone buttons to "advance" the slide, nothing happened...consistently. Could it be that a cell phone won't work for that particular operation? At any rate, you only get three minutes of free audio time on VT. Once your three minutes are up, they charge you $10 for an hour more. I came THIS CLOSE to just doing that, but I wasn't convinced that time was going to fix the problem, so I went ahead and did the remaining slides with the Voice Thread audio. It was fun to do the call-in thing, and I could see kids enjoying that, too...it could just add that little extra dimension or interest to creating the story. In all actuality, though, I would use the VoiceThread audio because it is so amazingly simple. It does all the timing and synchronization for you.

I really like the whole cell-phone digital story idea. The portability makes a story possible at any moment...that's a great writing/creativity ethic to instill in kids, and what a great way to do it! As third graders, my kids don't really have a lot of phones, and we could do the same type of thing with iPads. I like iPads a lot, but I just went camping, thinking I could take my iPad and do what I did with my sister's phone, and the relative size of the iPad made me change my mind...it just didn't seem like it would quite as much fun. Waaaaaaah...middle class American whiner...

The portability of the cell phone makes it fun to "play journalist"...uh oh...I just got a project-based-learning idea..."As a photojournalist working in...how can I tell the story of ..."
I'm going to sign-off now and see which one of our projects I can weave that into...