Creating a Digitial Story

Creating this digital story was truly an experience for me. As soon as the initial assigment was posted, I began to think about what story could I tell. I think that one of the most valuable lessons that I learned coming through school and now in my education classes is that to make something meaningful, it helps if it is personal. The slice-of-life memoir called my name, and I was led to write about my experience with losing my dad to lung cancer when I was in high school. At that point, I realized I have a subject and plenty of visuals; I knew that I had a story, but I didn't know the best way to tell it. I think that is a problem that my students will experience. Whenever I wrote words on the page, they didn't seem good enough. I worked on about three different versions (ways of telling the story as well) until I settled on the one I thought would be most appropriate for the project. Then, I forged ahead with the technology part of the assignment.

iMovie opened my eyes to an entirely new way of thinking about a story -- actually having a student-created movie. Now, I realize that this is probably common knowledge to the rest of the world, but to me it was earth-shattering. For once, I could think about the story I wanted to tell and its effect on my audience instead of just relying on the having sentences with good grammar to get a good grade. I think that my students will really like this as well. This project is one that (once given an overview of the program), students can do on their own with moderate help (as-needed) from the teacher. It provides benefits with regard to oral competencies -- because of the required auditory section. It allows artistic people (especially yearning-to-be-photographers) to flourish and really feel that they own this project. The peer review was another awesome part of this project.

I think that students who are not familiar with iMovie will be a little scared at first -- at least I was, but after they get used to it, it'll go easier. It would have been nice if I could have worked on this in my room (like the PowerPoint presentation), but coming to the lab worked fine. Again, students who are not familiar with computers would definitely be put off by this project, and they would need extra reassurance and help.

I would spend more time on the inital discussion of the project to develop that reassurance in the less-computer-apt student, which I think would minimize what I saw to be the biggest challenge of getting used to a new piece of software. I would probably have more in-class lab time for the first week before setting students out to finish the project. I would encourage peer-review for each stage -- even include auditory (feedback on the actual narration) and the visuals. I really felt like I experienced what my students will feel after learning they have an assignment using something they've never worked with. I learned a lot, and I feel a great sense of accomplishment because of it.