Final Digital Story Post

Hey All,
Only 83 more minutes until Youtube will finish uploading my video.  I am hoping it all goes okay.  It has been churning away uploading for 3.5 hours already.  Hope you enjoy it.

Here is the url that it will be uploaded at when if finally finishes.  I will come back and embed it after if is done.

http://youtu.be/_OuiSTzGGoE

http://youtu.be/_0uiSTzGGoE

I have the link twice as I am typing it on a different computer as I didn't want to disturb the uploading process on the mac.  I wasn't  sure if there was a capital "O" or a zero in there.  So I have one of each there.

Deb

Another piece of my project

Below is the url which I haven't event tested yet.  If you slog through looking at this very rough concatenation of pieces of a 20 minute group discussion I had with 4 teachers, and if you have thoughts about the order in which I should show each piece, I'd love to see them.

I know I need more narrative in between in the places where I have text only, to help explain my perspective of how the teachers are changing.

Deb



http://youtu.be/b8PZ7UGZNsE


PS.  I made this on my brand new as of yesterday, mac book pro.  That is the exciting part.  The difficulty is I still had difficulty in getting the video to youtube directly from iMovie.  So I didn't go directly from imovie and made a quicktime movie first, then uploaded that using the video manager on youtube.  That took 3  hours of rendering, and it still isn't visible on youtube yet, and this is only 10 minutes of video and I am worried I might not cut, and might add more.  ACK!  So I might be trying to upload starting on Friday.  I thought this machine was supposed to be faster!

Chapter 15: Copyright and Fair Use

"In short, we all came for clarity and left with grayity."  I think that statement from Chapter 15 sums up how to think about using someone else's work. 

Ohler's suggestions about how to talk with students about if they would like people downloading their music or art without asking seemed practical.  Naturally students, and any of us, would be flattered to have someone like our work and want to download it, so we say we would not mind.  Then the follow-up question asking if that was your soul source of making money, how would you feel?  Nice.  This can all lead to the frame of mind for students to ask permission to use someone else's work--a good habit to cultivate.

I was happy to see the more tangible guidelines offered from what the law says, although I realize not necessarily applicable to all situation. 
1. 10% or 30 seconds of songs or movies  (Does that mean if a a movie is 90 minutes long, you can use 10% or 9 minutes?)
2. 10% or up to 1000 words of text
3. No more than 5 images from one artist (Does that mean in one project?  So a kid could use 10 images as long as each one was in a different project from the student?)

So I agree with some of my classmates--perhaps it is easier just to compose everything one's self, and only search the Creative Commons site....

Adding music to videos, and doing mash-ups just seems like an exercise in futility now.  Too many permissions to get.  I can't use those first videos I made on a website for my job, as even though I am working for a non-profit in the name of education, the website does market our services to schools as well as provide professional learning information. 

Chapter 14

So being media literate means being a media persuader?  If that is the case then being literate means being able to persuade, and being math literate means being able to persuade with numbers?  That seems a narrow definition, unless the definition of persuasion itself is more broad.  Seems like self expression should be right up there when thinking of what makes one literate, or being able to communicate ideas or perspectives, for sharing understanding, but not necessarily for sharing in order to persuade.

“But rest assured that unless you actually create your own media, and do so paying particular attention to how to most effectively engage and convince your audience, then any appreciation you have of media’s persuasive abilities will be shallow and theoretical at best.”  Here he says that “engaging” an audience is important—perhaps it doesn’t have to be to persuade—seems mighty Western of him, to think that the only purpose of literacy is to convince others.

Rubrics that say, “in progress”, and “satisfactory” and “exceeds expectations” are only helpful in figuring out how one is graded if there is a plethora of examples available for students to be able to determine where the bar is for those expectations. 

It takes him a while to get to saying something specific—the first of which is watch it twice.  When I am grading projects, or even open response test items, I often read or look at everyone’s first.  Then pile them into like categories.  Then read or look at each again to start getting specific.  I also often use post-its for comments, in case I change my mind about what I think, from looking at it more than one time.  Now I will keep reading to see if he offers something as specific as this…

Ohler’s suggestion to see if you find yourself squinting when looking at student work is practical.  From his suggestion to have students reshoot photos that make you squint, I can tell he is suggesting that the teacher give the students feedback before the final production is done.  This also seems very practical.

Audio carries the story.  Well that seemed like the Captain Obvious statement to me. Stories have been told for ages.  I have painted my house while listening to the series of Pirates of the Caribbean playing on my tiny DVD machine that I couldn’t see, and the story was carried just fine.

Good question to ask a videographer: “How does the music relate to the story?”

Good question to ask oneself while making a DST: “If the music were removed, how would the story fare?”

Now here is a good exercise:  to determine the power of music, put different music to the same bit of video to conjure different feelings.

“Does your mind squint?”  Yes my mind squints at that question, tyring to figure out a specific example of what he means.  I am guessing it is the same as when  an English teacher would write “Awkward” next to part of something I was writing.  It didn’t really help me figure out how to write it better—I knew what I was trying to say, so I couldn’t see what the reader couldn’t figure out.  Mind squints seem like the same thing to me.  Asking a question of the student in that spot, might be a good way to get her to see what is making the teacher squint.

Storyboard...Who is doing the math thinking?

I have been having major trouble with memory on my ipad, which is where I edit my video.  Anyhow, I could swear I posted this last week to my blog.  But I do not find it when I look now.  I had it up on youtube.  Anyhow, here is my storyboard explanation.

And now as I paste in the code to embed the video, it is giving me a warning that the HTML cannot be accepted as the closing tag has no matching opening tag.  Ah, technology, it loves you or it hates you. 

I have a new macbook pro coming next week--so I will probably be either hating this or loving it, some more....

Here is the youtube url for my video as embedding seems not to have worked:

http://youtu.be/s6Lda4_XWT8

Chapter 13:  Toolbox

I am working to be waaayyy more brief this week--sorry about last week's length. 

Ohler has said a bunch of this before, but not all of it.  He does have to walk the line of not recommending, of not recommending too much old stuff since as soon as the book went to print, some technology is considered old.  However, I do appreciate an idea that he has expressed before, the new stuff is NOT necessary. 

It might have been nice to have a couple of lists rather than paragraphs, one for the very basic toolbox, and one for a bit more.  But that is just me wishing for brevity, as he does provide that information. 

Good advice he offered: 
1.  start with what you have, and check into what you really do have as you may not know it
2. give yourself a search time budget (I am not sure if this is actually budgeting money to pay yourself for searching, or if it is budgeting time to do the searching.  In either case, he is right, it is time consuming, and one should plan for that.

3. "My Motto: one eye focused on today's classroom, the other looking down the road."  I love this one, as it is true on so many levels (not just on the level of watching for technology, but on big ideas being learned, and types of human beings we are teaching our children to be.  (Stop there Deb, be brief.) 

 4.  The discussion on microphones was enlightening, I like the wireless type with which I might be able to record 2 people, and the idea of a flat conference mike.  "AUDIO IS KING."  If I had good audio, and bad video, I could probably put other pictures to it and find use for it.

For the rest of the stuff in the chapter, I am not really imagining doing DST in a classroom with kids, as I teach teachers about math, and I have other fish to fry.  So, it didn't seem to apply as much to my situation.  But I am considering adding a video component of teachers talking to other teachers about lesson plans they have created--which might be a bit of a story about how to create a tension in the lesson that kids can work through.

ARRGGHHH!  regarding video for Screencasting.

So, in my haste to make some room on my ipad, I deleted my screen cast from it.  I had no idea it would also remove it from my youtube account and my blog.  And so, I don't have the old one.  But later this week, I did another screen cast for work, and so I shall post that.  I was actually happy that I had learned how.  Anyhow, now I know I can't delete from my ipad without removing from youtube.  That makes no sense to me, and I need to learn about that--as I know I will be out of room here soon.

So the following video could be substituted for my first one.  Since I wasn't making it for you all, I probably don' t have the appropriate title slide and such.  I sent if out via email, where I used the email to set up the video.

I made this using Explain Everything on my ipad.

It is about how to get to a tutorial course on the Common Core Standards in Math.  The former executive director of the math project and a few other directors (not me) worked on it.  It is free and open to all--and is a good first step in learning.

You will see I was goofin with sound effects at the beginning.

This week's  video was trickier than I thought it might be after talking with some of  you yesterday.  I decided to get a new app on my iPad, Explain Everything which can do screencasts among other things.  I thought is was recording as I was navigating the site, as everything looked okay on the screen.  When I played it back however, sometimes the screen lagged, and I was still talking like you could see what I was referring to. So I learned to pause before navigating to another page on the website, and that helped.  I still had to insert some photos in places in order to clarify directions.

But then Explain Everything assisted with a problem I was having in iMovie for the iPad.  It didn't let me do title slides or credit slides, only add text on video or photos.  So I created my title slides and credits in Explain Everything, and uploaded the image as a photo to my camera roll, and then inserted in the right spots in iMovie.

Hope this is useful to some of you.  Common Core is really pushing for thinking and reasoning, and not just asking students to produce right answers to 30 problems just like the one modeled for them by the teacher.

Ohler's Production Process, Ch. 11 and 12

Chapter 11: The Media Production Process, Phase I: Developing the Story

Media production has built in assessment.  That part makes sense to me because as the author plays back the media production she naturally checks to see if she has caught what she intended.  It is more difficult for the author to keep perspective and see if the parts fit together to tell the whole story.  (Or perhaps that is me projecting what I find difficult onto this process.)  But the Ohler says, “Simply develop a checklist or rubric based on each phase…”.  Hah!  Simply?   That is not the adjective I would use in that sentence.  Using a rubric to assist with feedback is not a simple process—it is helpful I agree, and better for getting to the substance of goals, and for having students assess themselves—but it is anything but simple.  The development of the rubric itself so that it communicates the goals effectively and which communicates the distinctions between levels in a way that isn’t subjective is anything but simple. 

I must be cranky today as I read. Ohler’s next part is to make us not feel overwhelmed by the process by likening the process to baking a cake.  Some of my previous experiences with teachers saying something is easy as pie have lead me to believe that quite the opposite is true.  Teachers (especially math teachers) say with good intentions, trying to make the students relax, “This is going to be simple”.  [It would give the students more confidence to go ahead and do the process with the students, and then have them reflect on what they have done, noting the complicated process and how smart they are.  This builds confidence for next time. But I digress.] 

The 5 step process that Ohler identifies makes sense. I am just being picky about his choice of analogy and the difficulty level of the analogy.  As far as complexity of the task--is the cake being baked from scratch—or is it from a box?  He makes me doubt his own experience in baking cakes, when he identifies that “dough” must be finished in the production phase. I believe it’s called batter—but I am not a cake baking expert as I do make them from the box. Dough is for cookies and breads.  Although I take issue with this being as easy as baking a cake (as cake baking from scratch and decorating is not easy in my opinion, I do agree that the process he describes does seem fairly universal in its application to things that can be accomplished in life.

Ohler recommends a short task of introducing oneself in a short video with stills and narration, as a good first step, and to encourage students to play.  This makes sense so students have a sense that they can experiment and figure things out while talking about a subject they know, and without having a particular assignment which could constrict their abilities to let go and play.

Time:  wow!  That is a huge investment in time—one to two hours a day for a week!  (I assume he is talking about self-contained elementary classrooms here, and not secondary classrooms.)  To convince teachers that this is worthwhile in the classroom we need to indentify how a DST project for the students attends to goals they already teach in other ways or better ways or more efficient ways. More importantly, it is critical to identify the value-added is using this medium to accomplish their seemingly never-ending list of standards and content.  This is a tall order.  If all teachers started using some DST, and students became better skilled with multi-media production, this might reduce some of the time that might be required—but not much—gathering materials and editing eats up time.

Ohler points out the importance of ensuring equipment is available and working.  This reminded me about a tiny idea I have about teachers developing lesson plans for Common Core.  I have seen an online video of a science teacher describing a lesson for other teachers, stating goals, talking about how to set up a demonstration or experiments for the students, suggesting types of materials and describing what not to do for demonstration up front.  This seemed like an expeditious way for another teacher to get some information about a lesson in a different way than reading a lesson plan.  So, now I am considering what sorts of equipment I would need to provide groups of teachers while they collaboratively plan lessons, if I want them to create a short video to share with others about how to conduct the lesson they created.

Chapter 12:  The Media Production Process, Phases II-V

Much of this seemed repetitive.  I did find it useful that he provided a list of steps in production which started with finalizing all media pieces that will be part of the DST.  Then they are to focus on narration and record the story first using iMovie or Movie Maker.  After that, they add the media pieces including pictures and video, and then music and sounds, finally checking the mix of audio.  I noted that the narration was the first part actually done in telling the story and then all the other components are added in around it, in keeping with story first. 

He continues sharing nuts and bolts of production process which will be useful when actually implementing DST with students, including the fact that they will likely get tired of looking at their stories and lose interest and the ability to see when editing.

What was more intriguing to me were his thoughts about reflection after production.  He suggests asking the students to tell the story of their story-telling process.   We could ask them to identify some problems they encountered and how they learned to work through the problems (not just technology problems, but content problems as well).  This turns the teacher role into that of being a learning-coach—something we should pause and do more often in the classroom.  If I were asking students to make DST’s of their problem solving process—this would be key step in having them think about their thinking.

Another reflection he suggested was to ask teachers how DST changes their classrooms, or how it assists in making them communities of practice.  One of the hot professional development issues now is that teachers should be participating in Professional Learning Communities, and that all staff at schools should be part of those communities.  I have seen this sort of idea mandated and teachers put on teams and told to bond and become learning communities.  But I have not seen professional development that suggests learning communities could start inside the classroom, and I think teachers would find that a valuable idea.  If teachers were able to build communities of practice inside their classrooms, then PLCs outside of their classrooms might become extensions, just another place to analyze what is going on inside the classroom. 

 

Hey All,
Video woes for me this week.  I had an impacted work week and difficulty trying to complete this on my ipad.  For more detailed notes about that, please see below.

Hope the video isn't too long and that you enjoy fireside chats.  I don't think it works in Firefox.



Video Mashing Woes:
Thought I would explain where I am at with last week's video--this is a long list of excuses, but at least you can know I didn't just choose not to do it.
I  stopped by the apple store and bought the converter to connect the camera to my ipad and updated to ios 6, which meant I had to back up to the cloud (as I had bee using itunes on my laptop).  So a bunch of new stuff on the ipad.  The camera connector worked, with was good as I had seen various reports about it working and not.  And imovie was then downloaded successfully.  So I thought I was all set to go to a meeting in L.A. with my ipad ready to edit video, but turned out I left the ipad at home charging.  Oh well.
So after returning I couldn't complete the video by Sunday night.
I am still having trouble finding an app for converting youtube videos to mp4.    I downloaded tube downloader, which won't download anything from youtube, but does do some from vimeo.  Then I can load videos to my photo roll, and then I can see it in imovie.  Although some things say they'll only take the audio.  So doing mashups is really trying, as many  ideas I have cannot be found or downloaded appropriately.
So that is where I am at.  I should have communicated this a bit sooner, just so you knew what was up.  My intention was to edit my video from last week, as I had stuff I wanted to include that didn't, and I included stuff that was not the way I was supposed to mash up.  But I am not convinced that I can do that as I can't get the peanuts video which is pretty critical to my story--as its the trumpet I hear in my head when I teach by lecturing and not engaging students.
Sorry to be such a pain!

Chapter 9: Maps

The places where Ohler makes the tire-hit-the-road for me were in describing Egan’s and Adam’s work.  I found Egan’s list of questions in Figure 9.6: The Story Form Model useful for teachers in planning lessons, particularly, “Why should it [the topic] matter to children?”  and “What powerful binary opposites best catch the importance of the topic?”  The notion that one can begin a story by using binary opposites to set up the tension was interesting.  The example of the stream generation in science was a good one—looking at heat as a positive force or as a negative force.  In math one could harness that to get students to recognize that something must be going on to explain both forces.  

Adams sentence starters seemed useful too.  Often times I have asked students to write word problems for a math problem, like 

 3 x 4 + 6        or     3 x (4 + 6)       or    3 + 4 x 6. 

It would be interesting to try Adams sentence starters in conjunction with that idea.  “Once upon a time there were 3 friends…” You get the idea.  I would ask them to write for each of the expressions, so they could compare the different aspects of the story necessary to make each expression correct.  Adams Spine could assist in the story telling aspect.

Ohler makes the point again about the story coming first, but this time he identifies the effectiveness of the map as a tool in supporting the students to actually identify the “power” in their stories before they get too many hours into the digital technology aspects.

I also thought the idea of work to be done at home, might include watching a favorite TV show in order to make a map of a story.  The point of this activity is to learn about the map as a tool and to be able to identify the components of the story.  This makes sense to me as a step in storytelling, as it is what we at the math project call a “backwards question”.  When you are working on establishing an idea, if you only ever ask students to deal with it from one angle or forwards, they don’t get as robust a view of that idea.  They have a one dimensional understanding and cannot see when to apply it in slightly different situations.  Mark Driscoll, in his book Fostering Algebraic Thinking, suggests that going backwards with identifying terms in sequences is a necessary step before being able to generalize algebraically.  (That last sentence was more for me and Jeremy.)  Anyhow, seems like a good idea to both create story maps, (a question going forwards) and identify map from existing stories (backwards question.)

Commercials too! I love that commercial with the guy in the suit sitting at the kindergarten table with the small kids, just talking and listening.  It would be interesting to map those.  (Don’t you just wish you got paid to just to ask kids kooky stuff and then listen?)  Commercials might be a good medium to use in class.

Chapter 10: Other Kinds of Stories

His point: as usual, we westerners have a tendency not to include others.  I appreciated Ohler’s introduction.  I think this might be the first time I really felt like I could hear his voice coming through as he spoke about not knowing what we don’t know, but that him making a poor attempt at describing stories told by indigenous stories was better than no attempt at all.  I also liked  considering that we are all untied in our not knowing—at least those of us who don’t know about such storytelling.

But then after that he goes on a long time about how we can’t really know anything and cannot really attribute what we think we know to any particular folks.

That all said, the only idea I took from his analysis of types of stories and authors that worked out of the literary box of their times, was that this works like other ways we should be connecting with our students.  If you are teaching storytelling, you should look for storytellers of all genres as authentic resources; get them to come work with the students.  Make sure to properly respect their work and culture, and teach your students that too.

Video:

Noticing and Wondering 

or

How NOT to Become Charlie Brown's Teacher

Use the link below the window.  Evidently there is an error in the code to embed which I copied from youtube.

http://youtu.be/5nhBF736F34


Chapter 7 Story Planning Considerations

Here Ohler presents some of the tools and approaches he takes in teaching storytelling.  Below are the tools that struck me.

1.    The Story-Storming Grid seems like a useful tool—especially if groups of students were to do a project.  I can imagine students brainstorming alone first, and then the students putting their ideas out on the table and placing them in appropriate places on the grid, thereby identifying some problems without solutions or transformations.  Or perhaps each person in a group brainstorms problems, then the group places all problems out there and then more brainstorming to determine more than one possible solution and transformation that could be used to address the problem.

2.    I also appreciate the questions he provided in the event that someone is blocked: 

·       For teachers: “What’s an important concept you teach that you feel students have a hard time grasping?”

·       For someone telling a personal story: “When is the last time you cried or got really excited?”

·       For an organization: “What’s the most important thing you think people need to understand about eh value you bring to heir lives, and can you remember a time with a client that exemplifies that value?” 

3.    Research Box diagram in figure 7.1 which he said he uses for both storytelling and more formal research.  I would have liked to hear more about the latter just now, having just rewritten my outline of my culminating experience for EDTE 250i.   I agree with him that it allows the writer to keep thinking of idea, so as not to stop the flow, while also asking the writer to classify those things inside the story and outside.  In this way ideas are not lost, and can be put down, so the writer and identify their place and move on, instead of having too many ideas and going all over the place.  Below are the guts of the box from diagram 7.1.

Research Box… What’s inside the story? time frame… events… relationships… places… What is outside of the story?

4.    Tips for working with younger kids seemed to make sense.  Ask the students to draw a picture (which is something I would have thought about) about something that “reminds them of something in the story” (p. 100).  That last part seems like a nice twist that would help the students get started, as it reminds them of the story—rather than saying something like “captures the essence of the story” which might be a bit paralyzing to the student (let alone the fact that younger students wouldn’t use that language!)

5.    Ohler’s statement that “A story map is a portal into the storyteller’s thinking” was intriguing.  This might be another way to formatively assess student thinking.

6.    In “Telling via Transformation” Ohler suggests students should consider the potential of a story by identifying different possibly transformations for a single problem/solution pair.  This identification could assist students both in testing the viability of the problem/solution pair as a story, and in taking on different perspectives in order to consider different transformations.  This is something we need to ask learners to do more often—it helps them to see more than one side of an issue.

Chapter 8: Transformation Formations

Bloom was certainly a busy fellow, writing so many taxonomies including one about  Character “Transformation” with a continuum of change from physical through spiritual.  Then those familiar 8 categories were applied in a way I had not seen, in the taxonomy of Cognitive “Transformation” which described the changing in a character along the continuum from knowledge up through evaluation.  And finally he presented Bloom’s Taxonomy of Affective “Transformation” with a continuum beginning with the character receiving phenomena to the character internalizing values.  Who knew Mr. Bloom was so busy and well rounded?

Ohler states something that I sometimes get the feeling some folks in the institution of American schools forget is the primary function of a teacher,

"As always, what you’re really doing here is challenging students to understand something in greater depth.  After all, this is what teachers do." (p. 111)

Here here!  Let’s make sure everyone remembers that is our purpose!

        

Video: Urban S'Mores

Blog Entry for Chapters 4-6 in Digital Storytelling

[A note about me as a blogger: I am wrestling with exactly who I am writing this blog for.  If this was a paper for Mark, then I would have rewritten that last sentence so the preposition wasn’t at the end of the sentence.  But I am thinking this is less like a paper, and after reading everyone’s blogs, and after reading that we were supposed to write about what we find helpful for learning about digital stories, that this blog is primarily for me, and that I have an audience of my classmates and Mark that will read it and possibly assist with my thinking.  So with that, I change my approach form last week, where I basically summarized.  This week, I only write what added to my own understanding about assessment and digital stories.]

Chapter 4 Assessing Digital Stories

A way to have teachers consider assessment issues is to suggest they have an answer to a potential question by parents, “Why did you have my child create a digital story, and how did you grade it?” from page 63.  I am not sure that Ohler consciously used that question as a way to embark on the notion of assessing, or if he just pointed out that parents will ask that.  In either case, embedding new ideas in how teachers will use them in their work is always a better way to approach professional learning.  The other thing such a question does is to provide the teacher with some space to answer the question about assessment—she can consider it from a parent’s perspective rather than her own.  This shift in perspective can allow teachers to try on more than one side of the issue, rather than clinging to personal beliefs.

There are other work products along the way to students producing a digital story which can be useful in assessing students, i.e. scripts, work plans, visual representations of stories or story maps or story boards. 

Assessment of media might include a time when a student defends their choices and justifies their thinking.  I agreed with this thought and considered that such an event could be part of the complete projects—an interview with the creator (the student) where there might be 2 or 3 questions that would be part of every interview, and the possibility that there would be more questions.  I am not sure if this should be an interview with just the teacher, whole class, small group or with some sort of panel of outside folks.  That would probably depend on the project—and that makes this sound like a huge endeavor.  I was thinking more along the lines of a couple of questions posed by the teacher during an interview, after work was presented to the class.  It could be that interview is digitally recorded and reviewed later by the teacher—and not done live.

Chapter 5: Thinking About Story

Ohler spends a great deal of time distinguishing between the story core and the story map and the story board.  I can see this is because students probably have difficulty in fleshing out a good idea for a story, but it seemed like a bit of overkill.  I kept waiting for the ideas to really help with students, which I figure is the diagram and making sure it has all the representative parts.  So to summarize:

• Story Core is the story of “how people change, learn, and grow” and presents a central challenge for such changing and learning and growing.
• Story Map depicts the emotional journey.
• Story Board depicts the events and details of the journey, and how the logistical bits of the story will fit together to create the events in the story.

Ohler speaks about tension and how stories are better if tension isn’t just broken easily, and the resolution to the problem happens too quickly.  He cites McKee (1997) as suggesting a “seesaw” approach to the resolution which would make varying degrees of tension in the story.  As I thought about this and about mathematics—learning of mathematics should include some struggle, some opportunities for students to persevere and try different strategies.  Teachers have a tendency to over-scaffold—no fault of their own, we were taught to scaffold and are only trying to help.  But I can image that students in mathematics classes applying DST might be telling a story like the one Ohler presented about rolling a ball on a beach, in which the students tell the story of 2 things: 

• First, asking their own question about why the ball skidded instead of rolling,
• Second, figuring out how to answer that question.

So a DST in math could be structured like that, where the story is about how the students solving the problem and their learning journey—and less a report about the solution.  Moreover, the DST and the idea that there should be tension in a story, could be connected with the idea for teachers, that students need to struggle a bit (not too much just enough to know they can overcome and that they have the power to attack the next task).  The understanding that the story needs tension to be a good story might assist teachers in overcoming the urge to over scaffold as students are solving.

The picture of the story, the Visual Portrait of the Story, was an interesting tool that seems like it would be useful for students.  I can see that much of this is in line with giving multiple access points and using different modalities in order to give access to the students—sound teaching practice.  I do have to say, that I would love to see the power in the digitally telling the story—not that I doubt it isn’t useful—I am just thinking that much of what Ohler describes is good for non-digital reasons.  Naturally we do need to meet the kids where they are --starting with what they know is sound pedagogical practice.  If my students are digital in their lives, then his point about making sure we actually teach students to be better with it, makes sense.  I guess I am a bit like some of the respondents to the survey we conducted for our group project in EDTE 282, I’d like to see a finished product that harnesses the power of the digital world so I can say, “Oh yes, now that wouldn’t have been nearly as good a learning experience without the digital media aspect.”  [And now I reflecting about blogging again, and wondering how much “journaling and personal reflection” I should be doing, as I am probably boring the audience while I process internally. Hmmmm…]

Chapter 6:

One useful idea for actually implementing digital stories is the notion of keeping the story map diagram to one page.  This means the creator must be able to pick out the important pieces and know how they fit together to tell the story.  The examples of the story maps for the stories were helpful, but his method of leading up to us creating a story map for the William Tell story was the most useful.  I noted a connection to his telling of that story and a strategy that is particularly useful in a mathematics classroom.   In math, if you want students to state their reasons and to explain, then saying something wrong, letting them catch you, and then asking how they knew it was wrong, is a good strategy.  It checks their understanding.  It turns the accountability of making sense of math and being correct in math over to the students instead of the teacher, and it gives something to start from as they explain their reasoning that the teacher is wrong.  In this same way, he created a story, a bad story, so we could discern what was missing.  He suggested ways to improve it that were still lacking, so that we could figure out why that didn’t work, and what a better way to tell the story and create tension might be.  Finally, he presented the story map that fit the last version of the story.  As I think about it now, I can imagine story maps for the false starts he had, maps with flat endings on the diagram, just like he talked us through.

[Blogging: I have to admit, as I write, I cannot forget that I am writing something my classmates will read, and it seems a bit self centered—not sure that is the right word.  But it seems overindulgent to think you all will be as interested in my inner musing about why I found stuff interesting or not.  I am missing those visual cues that one gets in face-to-face conversation, to know if I’ve said too much.  And I haven’t heard your ideas, and had a fair exchange.  So yes “overindulgent” is the right word.  I do apologize for my musings above, and for this one here too.  It is how I process stuff.]

Equipment Used to Make Video

I was really low tech.  I knew I wanted to post faces of children, so instead of using the camera to take new photos of children, and having to worry about release forms for parental consent, I opted to search for free photos online. 

I did this on my desktop iMac (running OS X) at home and then used iMovie to create the movie.  I wanted to insert music, but unlike my work laptop, a Dell Inspiron computer, my Mac didn't have any preloaded music that wasn't copyrighted.  So I had to figure out how to go to iTunes and search for some music that seemed to fit.  I purchased a song, and then added that in.  Then I saw all these messages warning me about 3rd party content and copyright issues, so I removed the song.  Then I thought about it and decided I wasn't making any money off of this, so I figured it was okay, and remade the movie with the song.  I saw in the Digital Technology book that he will address this in another chapter. 

So that is the technology I used so far.

Digital Storytelling Ch. 2 and 3 and Video

Digital Storytelling, Chapters 1-3

From Chapter 1:  The Main Ideas...

• Tell the story first and that is the first goal—using the digital medium to do it.
• “Each one of us has to become the hero on our own life story.” page 8
• ”One of the most powerful stories a teacher can have students tell is the story of their future selves, in which they become heroes of the lives they want to live.” Page 9

From Chapter 2:  Nuts and bolts for teaching...

• 2 minutes—best length of time for a story to be assigned—makes sure the author plans how to use the time to get to the point.  Also, something 4 minutes long takes twice as long to make.

• As music can be evocative and moving in its own right, it might tell the story instead of the author—perhaps require that no music be used to ensure the author tells her own story.

• The rule of 80-20: Get 80% of the story done with 20% of the work on production.  Then let the last part of the perfect production be less than perfect as sometimes creating the last 20% of the story takes 80% of the time in production--not worth it.

• Require students to have audience be active viewers, and to design tasks or prompts for which the audience must observe.  This could be part of what is collected and assessed for their DST project.

• It is a good idea to balance the tension between creating a story and writing a report, by asking students to make to do half report and half story.

Chapter 3:

·       A barrier impeding progress by many is that teachers are unsure how to assess DST projects, and so they don’t do them.  They need support in this realm.  In an earlier chapter, it was suggested that districts will be moving toward DST as part of a student portfolio that will be assessed.

·       Narrative isn’t only written anymore, as many DST’s include narration, and so students can hear what their writing sounds like—assists them in hearing and editing.  Hearing oneself assists in self assessment.

 

·       Reflective learning communities for students.

·       DST allows many forms of communication, words, pictures, music, graphs, which supports different types of learners with a variety of ways to communicate, and also allows better communication with a wider range of listeners including special needs  and English language learners.

Here is a video that is dear to my heart, and tells you a bit about me.