For my Digital Story, I chose to use the app iMovie. iMovie was the right tool for me to use to tell my story for various reasons. First, it allowed me to create a story that incorporated different forms of media, text, images, video, and sound. The app is multi-stepped and allows you to add images or video, and then add audio and/or text separately. iMovie is also free, and can be used on multiple mobile devices such as an iPhones or iPads. Movies can also be directly uploaded and published to websites such as YouTube (Levine, 2007). Unfortunately, iMovie is not available for Android devices; however, my school district uses Mac computers, and so this is a tool I can see my students using in class.

From a pedagogical perspective, the reason I selected iMovie was because I had never used it before, and I know that some students in my class are quite proficient with using it. I wanted to try it out to see how easy it was to use, and whether or not it is something I would want to introduce into my own teaching. Before assigning my students a project that involves iMovie, I wanted to make sure that I knew how to use it so that I could (hopefully) help students who needed assistance, and also to make sure that there was some educational value, and that my students would not be using it just for the sake of using technology.

I plan on using my story to remind students about the potential dangers of using social media, since many of my students have their own devices and are already on sites such as Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram. My story can be used to spark a class discussion about how to stay safe online: not posting where you live or where you go to school, not adding people you do not know personally, not posting pictures that give out personal information, and strategies to stay safe, such as having an open discussion with a parent or guardian about who you are communicating with. We can also have a discussion about what Kevin did wrong, and what he could have done differently.

I found this task a bit daunting at the beginning, but once I wrote my story and had an idea of how I wanted to present it, sorting through the various tools available to present my story became much easier. I found that many video creation services were free for the first 30 seconds, but if you wanted anything longer than that there was a fee. Recording the audio was easy using QuickTime; however, finding images and video online that were open educational resources (OERs) was much more difficult and time consuming. I had originally thought it would be easy to just use pictures of myself and my brother when we were younger, but I soon realized to find an exact image to fit my “script” was much harder than I had expected, and so I had to do a lot of revising.

iMovie is definitely a tool I could see myself using with my class, and is something that I feel would motivate and engage my students.

References
Levine, A. (2007). 50 Web 2.0 ways to tell a story. Retrieved from http://50ways.wikispaces.com/