For my digital story, I chose to use Scrapblog to present my Tour of Western Europe. Scrapblog is a site that intermingles scrapbooking with blogging. The result is a site where users can create albums using scrapbooking collage elements such as stickers, frames, backgrounds, and themes. This was a fun project to do but took longer than I expected for two reasons: 1) I have never used Scrapblog before and 2) it took forever to upload my 1-2mb photos to their website. The second reason could have been avoided if I performed automated resizing on the images in Photoshop to make the files smaller. However, it was probably a good thing that I attempted my time consuming task in order to understand how slow things may go for a non-Photoshop-type user. The perfectionist in me also had too much fun with layouts, often wanting to make sure photos were lined up well and that “nice looking” fonts went with the images.

Last summer, I placed the majority of my vacation photos from Europe on Picasa, a tool suggested in CogDogTools. While many of my photos in Picasa have captions, they are more like short descriptions than stories. Picasa also enables geotagging which places the location of the photo and the photographer at the time the photo was taken. For my story, I felt this was not necessary although it would have been a nice touch. In Scrapblog, rather than placing captions alone, I did my best to make mini stories to accompany each page of compiled pictures since the photographs themselves could tell stories of their own. Privacy is also another concern of mine so even though Scrapblog has my name on it, the album itself mostly contains imagery of landscapes, structures and artwork and only one photo of myself at the end wearing black, with sunglasses on, camera in hand, and hair tied up – how incognito. The one feature I do like about Scrapblog is that the link to my album can remain relatively private and I can choose who I would like to share it with. For the purposes of this assignment, the link remains public.

As I was creating my Scrapblog, I was fascinated by the amount of scrapbooking elements available yet at the same time, I began to think how the use of such elements by other users would mean that my scrapbook would not be completely original. There would be no way for me to upload my own “trinket” images. Nevertheless, Scrapblog allows users to drag, drop, crop, adjust, and edit their own photographs and images. Best of all, users can have their very own scrapbook, card or calendar printed out and shipped. Other features I like about Scrapblog are its Flash video capabilities, much like one would find with YouTube. Users can pause the presentation, see which slide the presentation is on and navigate to the previous or next pages at their own speed. The selection of music is adequate as well, but is not a necessary addition. Visual transitions are also available to the user to make the change from page to page more appealing. For educational purposes, I think Scrapblog would make a good digital storytelling tool for kids and teenagers.