Reflections:
In my experience so far, an essay seems to be the go to grad course final assignment. I have become quite proficient at producing essays and therefore wanted to challenge myself by choosing a technology that I had not used before and a format of communication that I haven’t used since I was in grade school. I tried really hard to stretch myself with this project and make an infographic. However, I guess the topic was too personal, too impactful for me to be able to express all that I wanted to through mostly images as the assignment instructions prompted. That is when the idea of creating a storybook was born. The storybook website Story Jumper that I used was recommended by a collogue of mine. While the stock images that it provided did not meet my needs, I think that it would be a wonderfully suited to an elementary class. I was able to work around this limitation by creating my images in Canva, taking screenshots, then uploading the screenshots as “props” to Story Jumper. I loved that Story Jumper allowed me to narrator my story! I appreciated that it recorded one page at a time, so that I could take a breather in between pages and if I had to rerecord, it was only one page that I had to redo. I will definitely be adding Story Jumper as a tool for my students to use for their projects.
Hi Jill,
This is just awesome! I love it so much. I was also wanting to get away from an essay writing genre as I am very comfortable writing and not always so much trying new kinds of digital technologies that often take me a long time to ‘get’. This is such a cool idea because it really highlights the evolution of a classroom tool such as a chalkboard to something much more usable and practical (and cleaner!) like an OHP. I still have to use chalkboards in many of my classrooms in Japan and I really dislike them! Its just amazing to think that there was a time in human history when books were just becoming and people (scholars and monks if I remember correctly from a very funny video in one of our earliest units) didn’t even know how to open a book, let alone read or utilise a book for practical purposes, to having digital and audio books like this at our fingertips. Not only can we access these books online but we can actually produce them, which I think is just awesome! I would love to use this platform to have my daughter and students write their own books. I also really like how you integrated the technical sections in the end, as well as a glossary of terms and your final references. Incredibly clever, so well done! Thank you for sharing with us.