Reflection on social media creation
Posted: July 25th, 2011, by melissaayers
The Story of Scratch
Best viewed in “full screen mode” without using the “autoplay” option (i.e. click through instead).
My Story
For my story I decided to tell the story of Scratch, the educational programming language developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT. I wanted my story to detail where it came from, why it was developed, how it has evolved into the educational tool it is today and what its future might look like.
I created my digital story with two different audience groups in mind. The first group being a management team in charge of making the decision on whether or not to include a module on Scratch in the school curriculum next year. The second group is the potential teachers who would be teaching the new module if the decision was made to go ahead and include it in the curriculum.
I think this story is worth telling as Scratch is an excellent educational resource to include in many types of educational environments from beginner programming to arts based classrooms. I think teachers and school curriculum decision makers need to be aware of Scratch and its story so it can be a potential tool in their toolkits. Scratch is an easy-to-use and intuitive tool that can help students to amongst other things: think creatively, communicate clearly and analyze systematically. Furthermore, it also helps students develop a deeper level of fluency with digital technology.
My Tool of Choice – Prezi
I choose Prezi from Levine’s (2007) “50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story” for a number of reasons. Firstly, I wanted a tool that I could use to easily remix/mash-up existing resources (text, images, video, audio etc) in keeping with the philosophy of Scratch and the current 565 unit, “Unit 11. Rip Remix Feed: Creative Mashups”. I wanted to try and broadly bring these concepts into my digital story if possible. Secondly, I also wanted to create a story where people could go and dig deeper after the story was told. Specifically I wanted to give a quick overview of some sections and allow viewers to go back and look deeper into areas that are of interest to them after the presentation was finished. Ideally providing different levels of information for different audience members. Prezi while not perfect seemed to be the best tool from the list of 50 to fit these needs.
NB. If I had had more time to create this story I would like tried to give it a go in Scratch itself. This is due to the fact I think potentially Scratch could be added to the technologies listed in “50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story”
Reflection on social media creation
Wow I though this exercise was going to be challenging and it was – more so than I imagined. It was difficult at first to even select a story …. Then to have to select a tool(s) to use to present it! I think these two things were the most difficult part of the process for me. I do not come from a particularly creative or imaginative back ground – I am more logic based. However, in the end despite a few problems along the way I am happy with my result. I learnt a lot along the way and got to play around with a couple of what I think are really great technologies with many potential benefits for classroom use by both students and teachers alike.
