Digital Storytelling Week 2

"What way can you use digital stories in what you do?" is the question posed this week for our blog reflections... I guess the first thing to do is define what a digital story is. In my mind, digital storytelling includes digital cartoon strips, digital flip books, digital movies w/pictures, music, and animation, a voice recording talking about a particular pictures or diagram, and so much more. I currently use many digital storytelling tools in my classes and help other teachers integrate digital storytelling tools into their lessons. I love to use Animoto as a first day of class activity. I have students find pictures (about 12 for a 30 second video) that represent themselves, pick out music, & create a video that we share for the class to see. The students learn lots about each other and seem to have a great time doing this activity rather than just standing up and saying, "I like pizza. My favorite sport is basketball. My favorite vacation is..." You get the picture. I also have used Animoto to create a department video that we play at our "Back to School" night and at our "Preview Night" for prospective students visiting our school. It is so user friendly and quick, and the videos turn out very professional looking. I also just showed some preschool teachers in my system how to use Animoto and helped them create a video of their "Fire Station Field Trip." The teachers were SO excited about it, and the parents just loved being able to see the pictures in a fun format. I think they are hooked on creating the videos & will continue to do so throughout the school year.

In addition, I've used Windows Movie Maker with my students when they do their country project research. They find information and pictures about their selected country, import the pictures into MovieMaker, add transitions, text, music, and video. They can then narrate the pictures with the information they found out about their country during their research. The students much rather do this than create a PowerPoint with the information. They are much more engaged & excited about the project.

While working with one of the history/psychology teachers, I suggested using VoiceThread when doing the genealogy project. The students could get voice recordings of their relatives, especially their older relatives like grandparents and great grandparents. They could then put pictures up in VoiceThread & have the relatives narrate the project where applicable. I think it would be such a treasured, neat project to be able to have that saved with the relatives' voices and be able to share that for generations to come....and be able to actually listen to real voices of relatives for years and years to come. I think VoiceThread would also be a nice alternative to my country project as described above instead of using MovieMaker. That way the students could work on it collaboratively and web-based.

Kizoa is another really cool tool that I've played with personally but haven't done anything with it in school yet. With Kizoa, you can edit pictures and create slideshows/videos with those pictures. It is meant to be collaborative as well which is nice for having students share work or work together.

A few "flip book" type of digital stories that I've used or played with include MixBook, Tikatok, and Storybird. Storybird is nice because students don't need email addresses so this is a great tool for the younger grades when this often becomes the limiting factor. Dipity & Capzules are great tools for telling a digital story in a timeline format. I had my Web Tools class do a project with Dipity; they had to pick a person or a business and create a timeline of that person/business. The projects turned out GREAT and the students had a blast doing the project.

I've used lots of digital storytelling tools personally & am starting to integrate them more & more into my classes as well as sharing ideas with other teachers. I look forward to hearing how others are using the digital storytelling tools and learning about other tools that I'm not aware of right now. That's all for now....Have a great day!! :)