This past week was an interesting class for me.  I have always enjoyed the Civil War and really enjoyed looking at the site that Ken Burns had produced where you can make your own movies. This is something that I will have a definite use for in my classroom.  I work with a US History teacher and plan on using the Ken Burns site to create an introduction to our Civil War unit.  I also found it very helpful looking at the past final presentations.  It was nice to see what other people have done and what there projects look like.  Also, I have enjoyed working on my final project for the class.  It is something that  have wanted to do for a long time and this was just the excuse I needed.  It is kind of funny just how powerful story telling can be.  While creating the presentation and writing the script I was amazed that some of the same feelings that I had while experiencing the event came right back to me as I worked on the story.  As far as class room use for my digital story I plan on possibly sharing it with some of my students.  However, more importantly I would likely use it to help my students create their own stories.  Like the article I read the other week I really like the idea of having my students possibly create a digital story. 

531 Week 4 Reflection

This past week in class was a little different then I expected.  First, thanks for the pizza, that was really nice to have before class.  Anyway, to comment on what I thought was different was the idea of the Pod Casts.  Prior to class I thought I would have no use for them.  However, now that I see how easy they are they set up and to use I definitely see a use for them.  Specifically I can see using Pod Casts when I might be gone as a great way of communicating with the sub and my students.  Another great use comes when I travel.   This is a great way to record some of my knowledge and memories gained while traveling.  I can envision recording voices, people, and my own personal thoughts and comments on things.  I was actually really impressed and think of the Pod Cast as my own personal tape recorder.  On a personal note I love to fish and this s a great way for me to remember coordinates on the water as well as specific patterns that fish may be hitting on.  Just a really cool tool.  

I also wanted to comment briefly on my final project for 531.  So far it is going well but I am still struggling with garage band and trying to sync my pictures with the music and to overlap them with the voice.  Anyway, will keep plugging away at it.

531 Week 3 Reflection

There were several things that I wanted to comment on from last week.  First, I thought that it was good to see all the groups digital stories.  I was able to get some new ideas for my own personal story.  It was also nice to discuss each digital story as a class and get the groups feedback.  The next thing that I wanted to comment about was Joggle.  At first I spent a great deal of time spinning my wheels with the site.  Nothing seemed to make sense.  I spent several hours trying to upload a PowerPoint with no success.  However, once I started uploading pictures into Flicker I found it very easy to upload my pictures from flicker to joggle.  Once I had some pictures uploaded I was then able to play around with creating a slide show.  At this point I became much more comfortable and enjoyed playing around on the site. I am not sure how much I would use joggle in my classroom, but it is very nice to have an additional resource available. I am still most comfortable with Power Point but have gotten more comfortable with other sites.  One thing that I did not figure out was how to do the voice over on joggle.  I will check with people in class this week and see if anyone else had the same trouble.

Digital Story Telling

I plan to use digital story telling in my classroom in the following way.  First, I teach Social Studies and one of the things that I struggle with is to bring in some type of new emotion into my classroom.  So many times simply reading books tends to keep my students emotionally detached from the material we are covering.  I have struggled to try and give my students some type of real life connection to what we are studying.  By relating our material to real life situations I can hopefully inspire some type of emotion.  If I can tap into some of their emotions they will likely go on and ask questions about the material.  By asking these questions I hope they can then begin to think critically about the subject matter.  Using digital story telling is a tool that I can use to try and get my students interested in the material.  Digital story telling is a medium they are likely not exposed to.  I really like the idea that sound plays such a large role in many of the digital stories.  It seems students are constantly bombarded with talking and a story with simply told by sound will likely cause them to stop and take notice.  I am unsure which digital stories I will use at this point, but I saw several that interest me.