Class as of 10/24/09

What?
We are learning about Digital Stories and how to use them in the classroom. Digital stories are a collaboration of photos or videos and music and/or audio that introduces a school topic or teaches a lesson to students. Often it is used as a "hook" to get students interested in the lesson.

So What?
This is a wonderful way to bring education into the classroom! So often lessons go on in a normal, boring fashion, and often students aren't interested in learning what the teacher has prepared-not even giving the information a chance. We are learning about this so that we can use it in our classrooms to help our students learn information in a new way. This is also a great skill to have in order to be able to prepare stories about our personal lives, our families, presentations, school events such as graduation, and so many other areas.

Now What?
This technology will help improve my schema greatly! This will be a fun skill to master. I've done a similar assignment on Windows Movie Maker, but had several complications with the sound, so I'm excited to be able to use higher technology to complete this assignment. This will help me to incorporate more technology in the classroom than I could before, and will give me sklls to make me more valuable for the school and staff. I can also teach other colleagues how to create digital stories as well, and perhaps even teach my students how to do one for an assignment themselves!

Video reflection?
The video was very interesting. I was suprised at all of the lives that have been lost. I knew of the shuttle Columbia and Challenger-but not the others. The music and tone appropriately paid tribute to those people. The video was very impactful but I felt like there were a few glitches and it didn't flow very well. Over all though, it was a very good video. It's a great example as to how to involve peoples' emotions and give them information at the same time.