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Delivery format: Movie (using still images)
Upon completion of this module, the learner will be proficient in:
- Defining the components of a digital story.
- Developing a story that is interesting, engaging, educational and well designed.
- Using animations and transitions effectively to guide the viewer through the story content.
- Selecting photographs that are appropriate and effective in conveying the story theme.
- Using appropriate fonts for story.
- Incorporating music that effectively relates to the content of the story.
- Creating a lesson that incorporates digital storytelling into the curriculum.
Bernard Robin (n.d.), University of Houston professor states, "Digital Storytelling is a fantastic way to engage students, teachers and just about anyone else who has ever wanted to be the next Ken Burns or Steven Spielberg. There are many different definitions of 'digital storytelling,' but in general, all of them revolve around the idea of combining the longstanding art of telling stories with any of a variety of available multimedia tools, including graphics, audio, video animation, and Web publishing" (ΒΆ 1).
Used as a tool for delivering instruction, digital storytelling continues to grow in popularity for a variety of reasons. Your tasks in this module will be to learn the deceptively simply program called Photo Story 3 and use digital stories to create content for your course. You will be looking at the educational uses of digital storytelling as well as learning the components of a good story.
In addition to creating an engaging and effective digital story, you will develop a brief lesson in which students use digital stories for educational enhancement. This lesson will be shared with your colleagues as well as uploaded to HotChalk for the larger educational community. As ever, the emphasis is getting technology into the hands of the students.
In this project, you will be creating a story - that has, well, the components of a story. Your story will contain a beginning, a middle and an end. For more information on developing a good story, please read Digitales Take Six: Elements of a Good Story.
You may focus on your family, your career, your favorite past times, etc. In keeping with good storytelling, you will want to zero in on one particular aspect of your life. Thus, you would not have just a slide show with many photos of your life - but rather you will be telling a story about yourself. Examples of personal digital stories can be found by scrolling to the bottom of the following page:
http://www.coe.uh.edu/digital-storytelling/example-pages/personal-reflection-examples.htm
The following stories were developed by students in the MTT program and quite effectively convey a story.
The Making of a Teacher by Catherine Kirkendall
Circle of Life by Aide Gonzalez
A Tide of Memories by Bill Young
Dear Diary by Miguel Molina
View PowerPoint Presentations: An introduction to digital storytelling and Educational uses of digital storytelling by Bernard Robin.
Additional resources available here: http://www.coe.uh.edu/digital-storytelling/resources.htm
Project Description: In this project, you will be creating a digital story (using Photo Story 3) about you. You can use personal photos, other photos that you download from copyright free sources, relevant clip art (if desired), and personal narration as well as music and transitions.
This movie will give your classmates the opportunity to know more about you, either professionally or personally (or both). In this project, you will be creating a story - that has, well, the components of a story, like a beginning, a middle and an end. For more information on developing a good story, please refer to the reading assignments under Reading and Resources. You may also want to take a look at Digitales Take Six: Elements of a Good Story.
You may focus on your family, your career, your favorite past times, lessons learned, goals reached, etc. In keeping with good storytelling, you will want to zero in on one particular aspect of your life. Thus, you would not have just slide show with many photos of your life - but rather you will be telling a story about yourself at one particular time in your life. Examples of personal digital stories can be found under the Reading and Resources section of Module 1. In order to better understand the requirements for this project, you are highly encouraged to view the movies developed by students in prior classes. Additional by scrolling to the bottom of the following page: http://www.coe.uh.edu/digital-storytelling/example-pages/personal-reflection-examples.htm.
Remember, you are creating a movie that will give your classmates some additional insight into who you are and will entertain us by telling your story. For this project, you may be as creative as you want - in fact, I enthusiastically encourage you to be creative.
Technology Tool: Photo Story 3 was chosen as the vehicle for this project for several reasons.
- First, it is free to all Windows XP and Vista users.
- Second, the learning curve is minute. You can learn the program in an hour.
- Third, despite the price (free), you can create a product that is quite nice.
- Fourth, knowing how to use this tool tends to come in very handy for your role as an MTT as it is technology that is easily accessible to people with all levels of technology expertise because you can conduct training and know that schools can easily (and at no cost) have the program installed on all the computers at a school.
While Photo Story 3 is free, for some strange reason, explicable only to Bill Gates and his minions, the program is not already loaded on the Windows OS. You will have to download it from the Microsoft website. At the Microsoft site, you can also find additional tutorials on how to use Photo Story 3.
Often, I have students ask me if they can use Movie Maker 2 (which is already on Windows) instead of Photo Story. The answer is yes. However, one thing that you can do in Photo Story 3 that you cannot do in Movie Maker is to "zero in", pan out or in or zoom to a part of a photo. This feature of Photo Story 3 allows you to control your audience, because you can focus in or out of a particular photo guiding their eyes in the direction you want them to go. This feature is particularly effective when telling a story and, thus, we highly recommend that you learn to use this free program.
Advanced Techniques: One of the limitations to Photo Story 3 is that you are unable to create a blank slide to use for the opening of your movie or for the credits at the end. Thus, you have to create a blank slide in the color that you want and import the blank slide into Photo Story 3. You can do this easily by creating Power Point slides with a variety of background colors and converting them to JPGs. To do this, you would convert your Power Point presentation into jpg files. If you are not sure how to do this, follow this tutorial on creating blank slides and saving Power Point presentations as JPGs. These slides can then be imported into Photo Story 3 as images.
Resources for learning: For a step-by-step tutorial on creating a digital story using Photo Story 3, please click here for HTML format or here for PDF format.
While the above tutorials are probably all that you need to learn the program, other tutorials are available on the Microsoft website; in addition, various tutorials can be found when you google Photo Story 3. However, rest assured, Photo Story 3 is quite easy to learn.
Length: These days, we typically have very short attention spans. Your movie needs to recognize that characteristic of the audience and cover just enough content to be interesting - but, not so long that the movie becomes boring to your audience. Thus, an appropriate length would be 3-5 minutes. Keep in mind that you could probably create a thirty minute movie about your family that would enthrall them throughout - but, for the purposes of your colleagues, you must create a much shorter movie to hold their interest.
Project Description Part B: In the final component of this project, you will be using your newly acquired skills in digital storytelling to create a lesson. You will not be creating a lesson on your story that you developed in Part A. The creation on of your personal digital story was intended as a fun way to teach you the skills while allowing your instructor and others in the class to get to know you. Thus, for Part B, you are to envision how this tool could be used for instructional purposes in your school or workplace.
You will be submitting your lesson to the wiki for others to see as well as to HotChalk to share with other teaches internationally. For suggestions on writing a thorough lesson plan, you may find the following web page, 10 Steps to Developing a Quality Lesson Plan useful. The aforementioned web page is a component of the HotChalk website.
When creating your lesson, please use the HotChalk template. You may browse the site for examples of other lessons submitted by teachers across the world. Some lessons are very simple and others quite complex. Please provide enough information so that someone else could read your lesson and follow how to teach the lesson.
Please save your lesson plan as follows: course#_firstinitiallastname_project1B.doc, then add the URL to the 6340 Project 1 wiki page. Submit your lesson to HotChalk at the following page. Please forward your confirmation of submission to your instructor. As always, be mindful of grammar and mechanics when you submit your lesson.
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