The toughest part of putting together any multi-media project is getting the media – particularly when 90% of it is analogue. In this day and age, it is certainly easier but as my stories and ideas often come from – yes, it is true – pre-digital times, tracking down these items and digitizing them can be quite a task. Thinking forward, I should probably capture more with my 3 digital cameras & cell phone – a hard habit to get into since I was brought up on an aperture priority SLR – to say nothing of digitizing my old photos). Still, coming up with a true(-ish) story to tell that would be worthwhile pedagogically, a good fit with the course I’m developing and interesting to my students (and my classmates), was no easy task either. In fact, I actually found the ‘search’ for the ‘right’ tool and the ‘ease of use’ relatively easy in comparison. This is not to say that I did not get mired in both possibilities and perfectionism, but I worked quite hard to plan properly and to stick to the plan so I only went about 5 hours ‘over budget’.
I chose to relate a story called a critical incident (true story, just the images have been changed to protect the innocent) that happened to me some 20+ years ago. It is a story that I have told orally, but have never written down. I do use critical incidents when I teach, but they are always delivered in text form – whether in person or online. Although I had no idea how it might look as a presentation/media ‘event’ of any sort, I tried to imagine what the possibilities were and what I could (a little unusual for me, admittedly). While I go into more detail on my Story page, I will say here that I’m very pleased with choice of Prezi as an authoring tool. My story flowed nicely from my memory, to text to Prezi, with very few bumps along the way. The movement that Prezi allows from point to point (and back again, if you – the presenter or the audience – wish or need to) adds visual movement the presentation of story elements making it seem as if it were animated. It is simple, yet really creates a dynamic presentation, not only on its own, but with an added oral component as well (I tried telling the story as I watched it and it was great). Heck, I was so pleased with it, I even asked a friend to look at it to make sure it made sense (and thankfully, it did). I think my students will really benefit from using this tool (again, more about this on my Story page) and hope to use it in my regular classes. All of my student do presentations at the end of their program and I would love to see them try using this tool to enhance them. I’m envisioning introducing the tool at an earlier stage and getting them to do some of their projects on them.
Bottom line: I had fun. I enjoyed this activity on many levels (especially the stress to success ratio) that it even made storytelling (something I do not do creatively well at and hence am not fond of) enjoyable.