While I haven’t published my story here yet (I haven’t settled on a final version yet, but two preliminary versions have been posted to the discussion forum in Vista), I’ve had quite the adventure so far.
When I first encountered Alan Levine’s “50 Ways” website (http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryTools), I was really excited and amazed thinking about the possibilities. After looking at most of these tools (usually by viewing the “Dominoe” story), I wrote my own story, collected some images and went back to try some of these out.
What soon became clear is that there aren’t as many different options as one might think (“50” or not…); many are very similar. In any case, I created two complete versions of my story (using “yodio” and “photoshow”), but also created partial trial runs using six other tools. This experience taught me that most tools are easy to use, but each seems to have limitations of one kind of another. What this boils down to, I would argue, is having a clear idea of what you want to create and why and choosing accordingly. Just because a story can be told in many different media doesn’t mean that all of them are appropriate.
Impact: the story I created in “yodio” is much more comprehensive that the one I created in “photshow.” The former allows audio that goes with images; this give one the opportunity to include details that the latter does not allow. This is because photoshow uses captions to go with images; captions, by their very nature, must be very concise. So this version of the story omits many of the details that I feel are important to the learning objectives of the story. On the other hand, I prefer the look and feel of the photoshow story… Hmm… what to do!
Having said all that, I believe that the possibilities here for motivating and engaging students are valuable and very real. My story is for my English 200 course: Survey of English Lit. Offering a story about an author we will be studying is much more engaging for online students that just having them read a textbook, and if we can bring the author to life, we can do the same with his or her writing.
That’s my take so far; I still have to decide on the final tool I will use and make some final adjustments.