Digital Stories

I made this digital story to show my students what a digital story was, because I wasn't sure they were familiar with the medium/technology. It is a simple digital story which consists of only two photos, some text and a few words. Because I was familiar with the technology I was using to make it (Windows Movie Maker) and because I had a complete vision of the "story," it took a matter of minutes to create. With that said, those short few minutes were possible because I had already spent a few hours previously using Movie Maker.

My hope was that my students could make a similar length movie about an academic subject, namely part of an article about cells. Despite the expectation that the students' movie last 20-30 seconds and include 2-3 images, I was unable to transfer my knowledge of Movie Maker to the students to save them the hours that I had needed to become proficient using it.

Nevertheless, a digital story provides another option for a project or for submitting work. It could fit into the classic list of differentiated products: essay, song, game, poster, PowerPoint presentation, etc. Add to that the digital story. I now know there are numerous other technologies for creating digital stories: Photo Story 3, Voicethread, or Vuvox to name just a few. (The former is a free download from Microsoft, whereas the latter two are web-based.) As students become exposed more and more to the digital story, the time required to use the technology should decrease. Ultimately, making a digital story could be as simple for a student as checking email.

Besides modeling the use of digital stories to my students, I could use them to deliver content. My final project for this class, about which I will blog later, is an attempt to scaffold difficult language for ESL students as well as model digital story technology.