Toward a Community of Learners at Coal Tyee Elementary

The above Vuvox presentation is short story of the almost accidental creation of a Professional Learning Group at Coal Tyee Elementary, and the very intentional groundwork for building a community of learners.

While I didn’t take advantage of many of the affordances of Vuvox in this my initial creation, I can see a great deal of potential for this to be a powerful mode of storytelling.  I had some difficulty aligning the narration (which was created first) to the slideshow and in retrospect, if I was to do this in the same way again, I’d have the slideshow story-mapped first, and then narrate it second to avoid some of the other timing issues.  However, I’m not sure I’d do it this way again.  I think that the power in this tool is to break-up the linearity of the story and add detail to each of the images.  Just for fun, I added a few comments via the hot-spot option, but I would likely use these to add in necessary text or video to move the story along.  Initially I didn’t want to do this because I think it’s important to get away from too much text in visually based media, but in limited use, it could add a lot to the images’ voices.

If I was to use narration in the future, I would likely use Garage Band or other software to add background music behind that narration.  I was somewhat bothered by the audio of this presentation ending long before the images finished scrolling.

Other features that I made limited or no use of, but would in the future are the ability to rotate images (like the “BIG!” image) and cut-outs.  Originally, the calendar was cut-out to make the background transparent, but it wouldn’t render correctly in the slide show.  This might have been a server-side error, or a result of the fact that I deleted the original cut-out image from my media store after initially publishing it.  I never created another cut-out to  see which, but I think that I would use a lot of cut-outs in future presentations if they were to render correctly.

In selecting a digital tool for this assignment, I was looking to extend my comfort level and try something different than what I have previously done.  Key in that decision was to find a tool that allows for divergence from the temporal fixity of traditional storytelling and many other digital tools.  This ruled out Animoto and many of the SlideShare type tools.  What drew me to Vuvox was the mixture it provided of having a start point end point, but variety available in the getting there.  The ability to add hot-spots, hyperlinks, video and a multitude of image types was very appealing.  Upon reflection, I wasn’t completely successful in breaking that fixity by narrating and embedding the audio file, but that’s a lesson learned through experience.

The story I told through this presentation works within the framework of professional development that is ongoing in my school.  Explicitly building a community of learners is something that many others are interested in and this presentation, with edits from what I’ve learned in its creation, could be a powerful primer in explaining the process and result of creating a community of learners my to peers.  Some of the edits that I would include are:

• a move away from narration if I was to present in person; I’d leave it in for someone else to present or to post on a blog/website
• use images of the staff involved, or their own avatars, not stock photos
• add video of the lessons and/or student reflections and interactions
• include much more detail and related links for resources in hot spots

Vuvox worked well for me to tell this story because it provided a multimodal platform onto which I could piece together the information, images, text and audio that I wanted to include.  It also allows for regular editing and additions as the story progresses.  This could be particularly useful in my case of providing professional development around a dynamic topic.