My Digital Story – A recent hiking trip in California.
If you hover your mouse over the photos, you will see an “i”, click on this and you will see captions that go along with the photos. You can also click on the map to get a better view of the map, or to see where some of the pictures are connected to the trail.
Clicking on a photo and choosing “see original” will take you to the actual everytrail.com site, where you can see a description of the hike, tips for other hikers, etc.
Widget powered by EveryTrail: Geotagging Community
Just for fun: http://prezi.com/130943/
Reflections
Make a posting to your weblog in which you consider your own experience learning how to author using the tool you selected.
This assignment was very frustrating and very interesting all at one. Each step took much longer than I had originally anticipated, however I am happy with this new found skill and I intend to use the everytrail application for future hikes.
Step 1 – Checking out the various tools, approximately 4 hours playing with various applications
Step 2 – Choosing one specific tool (included in the timeframe above)
Step 3 – Figuring out the Tool (multiple steps involved here) approximately 1 hour
Step 4 – Creating my Digital Story approximately 4 hours (I don’t think I had the tool as “figured out as I had thought!)
Step 5 – Editing my Digital Story approx 2 more hours trying to get the tool to do something that it would not do….. Stubborn media tool!
Step 6 – Using another tool to tell the story (couldn’t resist)
Why did you choose this particular tool?
While I was exploring the tools, I found that I really liked certain features of various tools. I can’t wait for the time when we can not only remix our projects, but remix the actual tools (combine features from various tools). The interesting layout options are fantastic with the Prezi tool, Voicethreads has excellent options for viewer participation, and Toondoo allows a great combination of existing cartoons with the heads of photos from the user’s computer. However, even with all of these interesting features, I decided to use the everytrail application.
The everytrail selection was somewhat self serving. Over the past couple of months we have been hiking in the mountains of Southern California, with our new toy – a gps. This gps tracks our path, distance and speed, so I wanted to test out an application where my hiking data could be of use. I think this approach is also important when working with students – allow them to choose a project or application that ties in with their own life experiences and interests.
How did the tool impact the manner in which you told your story (perhaps in a way that is different had you just used text or related the story using your voice)?
I was not able to change the order of the pictures. The gps data from our hike is actually the data on the way down (not round trip) and the program reads the file time of the pictures and ordered them chronologically. This is a problem when some pictures were taken on the way up, and some on the way down.
If I had just used text or voice, I would have likely told the story based on the memories I had, not based on the photos or map. I do appreciate that this tools allows me to incorporate the actual map of our trip, this bring a larger perspective to the story.
How might you use such tools in your own teaching to produce materials for students? How might students be given access to the same authoring tools? What kind of impact would you expect to see in your students in terms of motivation, creativity, or any other characteristics? Describe how a story-telling approach would work within a course that you teach (or would like to teach) using sound pedagogical arguments.
“In order for educators to reuse other educators’ materials, they need to be able to customize or adapt the materials-maybe because they need to make a resource more applicable to their local context or maybe because they have a new idea, one that the original creators never imagined.” (Lamb, 2007)
This also applies to students. I found it much more motivating and interesting to take a technology and create a story that applied to my own context rather than writing an uninteresting paper, so it would make sense that students would also feel this increased motivation due to the novelty and to the creators control over the product.
Many of our online activities are text bases – student read information and discuss their opinion about it, or answer some questions. These mash-up tools allows us to include various learning styles into our assignments. Including the pictures and the creative layouts would likely intrigue the visual learners. When we are able to add voice and music we respect the auditory learner. The greater variety of activities we can provide, the more differentiated our activities become and hopefully the more learners we engage.
When considering the everytrail application, or the Prezi tool, we can think back to the Sections model from Bates and Poole (2003).
S – Students: The students in my online school do have access to the internet, and since they are using school computers, I know that the computers can support the everytrail and the Prezi tools.
E – Ease of use and reliability: Familiarization with each tool requires hands on practice (and the tutorials were convenient). From my experience with these 2 tools, I would say that they do meet the criteria for the ease of use.
C – Costs: Cost pre learner is nothing in the monetary sense. This fits within our school budget.
T – Teaching and learning: These applications extend learning beyond text based assignments to include multiple learning styles.
I – Interactivity: These applications enable students to be the creators of their own learning products – they can choose how to show us what they are learning. Students interact directly with the mash-up tools and choosing the media types to include (photos, voice, music, text, etc).
O – Organizational issues: I would have to consult our IT department first if I expected to have any IT support…. Even if I did not require support, I would still actually need to consult with the IT people as they don’t appreciate having additional programs loaded on our school computers. Hopefully they can see the educational benefits of these applications.
N – Novelty: The everytrail and Prezi tools would be very new to most students.
S – Speed: Materials can be easily edited and updated
These tools speak to engagement and motivation as well as diverse learning styles. I could envision encouraging students to use some of these tools for Science presentations. One assignment asks students to choose an element from the Periodic Table and to describe its properties, uses, where it is found or how it is made, etc. The Prezi tool would be a fantastic way for students to share their information with each other.
In math we are attempting to include a project in each unit. The everytrail application would be an excellent project for the measurement unit. Students could gather their own data (if they have access to a gps – or if our school obtained one to loan out). Then students can analyze the data in a variety of ways (calculate how much water is needed, how many calories are burned, what the costs would be of setting up a hiking guiding business)
References
Bates, A.W. & Poole, G. (2003). Chapter 4: a Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education: Foundations for Success. (pp. 77-105). San Francisco: Jossey Bass Publishers.
Lamb, B. (2007). Dr. Mashup; or, Why Educators Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Remix. EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 42, no. 4 (July/August 2007): 12-25. Accessed online July 16, 2009 http://www.educause.edu/ER/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume42/DrMashuporWhyEducatorsShouldLe/161747