May 04 2009
Digital Story
This story was created using Slide.com.
Check it out Journeys story
Reflection on my digital story….
I chose to use Slide.com for my digital story but I think that I looked at just about every tool listed by Alan Levine at http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryTools. His article covers over 50 story tools and is a wonderful resource. His choice to show his own story, Dominoe, using all of the tools he lists is excellent. Suffice it to say that I probably looked at around 40 of the tools. What a way to spend the afternoon.
I chose Slide because I liked the skins and backgrounds that were available. It also had a library of music and did not allow you to import your own music. Honestly, I saw this as a plus as finding royalty free music that I want to use has proved quite difficult. Also, when I looked at the music that was available it was quite good. There were recognizable artists and a good number of choices.
Slide did not really limit the way I told my story. It was rather intuitive and the idea that I had prior to finding a tool was easily executed on this site. I can say that the use of social media lends itself to less language and therefore more care needs to be taken with the words chosen. It is not a format for the verbose! The exercise in choosing your words carefully will be a good one for many of my students.
Overall, I am fairly happy with the product. There were a couple of design and functionality aspects of the program that I did not enjoy such as the inability to have the piece end at the last slide but I also noticed this on several other social media sites. I was also unable to control the text size on the frames and would have preferred these to be larger.
In my own practice I am very keen to utilize social media tools. In my socials classes I plan to have my students create digital stories in groups utilizing a jigsaw format to tell the stories of historical characters. My first one will examine the people of the Gold Rush in the Cariboo. Access to tools of this nature will have to be approved at the District level beforehand but I think that I can make a convincing case for them after my experiences here and in ETEC 532.
I fully expect that my students will be completely engaged in creating stories of this nature and students who struggle with mainly text-based projects will be thrilled to work in a primarily image-dominated format. Allowing students to be creative with digital images also serves to demonstrate to them that creativity is not limited to painting and drawing as most of us were taught in schools.