Phoenix Rising

I’ve started my second class in my Lamar University Masters’ in Educational Technology Leadership. The class is Multimedia and Video Technology. As our first assignment we had to create a photostory. It had to be 3 minutes long and follow the format demonstrated in an article we read. The article (longer than an article really) from the Center for Digital Storytelling was called Digital Storytelling Cookbook by Joe Lambert. It’s got some great tools in it…I highly recommend you read it.

Here is the video that I created, followed by some reflection on the process (also a requirement of the class).

The software wasn’t an issue – as I teach Photostory 3 a lot. The real difficulty for me was keeping my story down to 3 minutes. I felt like I had to cut out a lot of my personality (I had some funny stuff in there…some emotional stuff too). But I had to cut it down to the essentials (a really good lesson for me…and for students). As I ended my photostory with a simile…I instantly saw the application for storytelling to help students learn simile and metaphor…lots of literary devices. Can’t help it…it’s the English teacher in me. I don’t like the quality of the video from .wmv to .flv through the YouTube conversion. That bothers me, but I wanted to use the software they told me to use.  All in all, it was a good experience for me. I’d done several short examples for teachers to look at as they learn Photostory 3, but having to turn out a complete story really helped me see this from the students’ point of view.

In a couple weeks I’ll be teaching an iMedia Academy during our Technology Learning Fair. 4 days of digital storytelling and moviemaking. I am going to use this experience (and my example) to help my teachers understand the impact that digital storytelling can have. I hope it will help them to start seeing all the ways that our students can use their own stories to help them learn content in their classes. (I’m ALL over this for English class…but I’m already plotting for all my other core teachers as well…muwahahah)!

Overall, a good experience for me! Hope you enjoy!