While narratives are often developed with characters and drama to share a personal experience, I chose to create a digital narrative that will be educationally instructive. It is intended as an alternative mode of presenting ‘how to find information on the internet’ and is to become a learning aid for Topic 3 of my Moodle course, Discover: a short course in digital information literacy.
I used Stupeflix after first trialing Webslides. I had hoped to use webslides because my topic involved screen shots of websites, but I kept getting a screen message “we are experiencing technical difficulties”. If a site is not reliable, then it shouldn’t be used!
I found Stupeflix to be great, and very intuitive to use. It was a matter of opening an account, importing images, and overlaying music or other audio as appropriate, then publishing. However, I had uploaded 58 images when I discovered that a cost would be involved! (perhaps I hadn’t read the manual :). I was so impressed by Stupeflix that I paid an annual subscription and went on to publish the complete narrative.
Reflection on this project: It took ages to work through the options of cogdogroo. Indeed, the greater time spent on this project was checking out the Dominoe narrative and comparing storytelling products. However, I had in mind that I would use video so it was a matter of choosing the video software that best suited my purpose of demonstrating some websites, overlaying some text graphics and contextualising everything with text slides and images from the course.
The digital storytelling project has required me to reflect on how to do an information search on the Internet, to “teach myself” the steps to do searches on different channels, and to replicate the steps in a multimedia narrative that is meaningful to viewers. Hence, the process of constructing a digital narrative has been a valuable, reflective learning experience. It reinforces in my mind what Sanders et al (2009) have said about the value of narrative for reflection and for making meaning. The experience can only be more powerful if done as group work.
Sanders, J., Murray, C., & McPherson, M. (2009). Chapter 9: Reflective Learning for the Net Generation. In T.T. Kidd & I. Chen (2009), Wired for Learning: An Educator’s Guide to Web 2.0. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.
8 replies on “The story of a search for information”
That was outstanding Janette! What a great tool for doing slides – I can’t wait to try it! The music selection was perfect and your “lesson” about digital information literacy was so informative. I really appreciated your review at the end – going over a summary of what the presentation was about – excellent step to take when providing what might be new information to your viewers – dmoz.org was new to me I have to admit!
Don’t worry, dmoz.org was unknown to me until recently. thanks for the feedback on the Stupeflix story Brenda.
Hi Janette,
Thanks for sharing such a great tool for teaching kids information literacy. You have brought together what could be daunting tasks to a simplified approach (e.g., scroll down and look at dates) and have included important tools like wikipedia and journal searches (libraries). The technology you have used looks great and it actually has a Prezi look to it.
Nice Work!
Stephen
thanks Stephen !
Hi Janette,
You have provided us a very good example at how to make the best out of this tool… and now gives me the motivation to use it as well and perhaps subscribe to it!
Great work! ;o)
Johanne
thanks for your encouraging comments Johanne.
Wow! Nicely done. I have not used this before but look forward to spending some time discovering it. Thanks.
Ken S.
thanks Ken!