My Digital Story: An Unexpected Discovery on my Summer Vacation
My digital story can be viewed here:
Introduction:
Because I hope to actually use this digital story with my students, I wanted to choose a story that I really do tell my class every year in our human body unit. I normally just share this story orally with the students when we are working on the circulatory system. I thought that this particular personal tale that I have selected would lend itself well to being shared digitally.
My digital story explains how I discovered that I have Raynaud’s disease. It happened in the middle of a summer vacation, and it was quite puzzling as I had not previously suffered from the condition at all. My video explains where I was and what I was doing at the time of what was for me, a medical mystery. I also share a somewhat simplified scientific explanation for the condition. I wrap up the video with some of my practices, as I do try to be as proactive as possible in regard to this condition in my life. I absolutely love science and biology in particular. Despite the pain and negative aspects of my condition, I am fascinated by the illness and I try to think positively about it in that I get to show and tell my students about this very interesting disease from my own firsthand experiences with it.
Selecting the Right Web Tool for Me:
With Bates and Pooles’ (2003) SECTIONS framework in mind, I spent a great deal of time working through many of Alan Levine’s suggested 50+ Ways to Tell a Story (http://50ways.wikispaces.com/) before I made my decision in regard to which tool I would be using to complete this assignment . As I worked my way through the list, I was paying special attention to ease of use, general publishing affordances and also the cost of the resource. I was disappointed to find that some of the web tools listed on Alan Levine’s list are no longer available, which realistically is simply the nature of the internet. Some of the more promising looking web tools are unfortunately no longer available for free to users. Although I am not unwilling to pay for a resource that I am going to make frequent use of, for this assignment, I did want to select a free web tool. I am hoping to use this video not just as a part of my Human Body Science unit, but also as a hook to get my students interested in digital story telling. Since I hope to use this tool with students, I wanted the web tool to offer at least a decent free account with affordances for publishing work of a few minutes in length or longer.
I have heard good things about Animoto (https://animoto.com/) and I was thinking that this tool would have all that I needed to complete my digital story assignment. That is what I thought until I clicked on the pricing tab only to discover that the free account limits your video length to 30 seconds. Obviously, that did not meet my needs for either this project, or for use with my students in the future. There were a few other resources that initially looked appealing to me, but upon closer examination they either required Powerpoint, which I do not currently have access to at home, or they did not allow for audio file uploading and/or voice over narration. Having only used moovly (http://moovly.com/) once before (I used it to create my introductory module hook for my Moodle project), I decided to play with the tool’s affordances and see if I could tell my digital story in the way that I hoped to using my free online account. Essentially, I chose moovly.com for the following reasons:
– I had used it once before and was at least a bit familiar with the functionality of the site
– I knew that videos produced using this tool are downloadable (even with the free account) and easily uploaded to youtube.com internally from the moovly.com site
– the free account has a great deal to offer users such as a generous limit of 10 minutes for video length, an unlimited number of videos can be made, as well as the ability to upload image and sound files to be used within your own video productions
– the free account also gives users access to 2 standard libraries of usable images, including many animated graphics, to enhance the quality of the video production
The only element that the free account lacks that I was hoping for, is the ability to upload video clips. I had originally intended to film my own hands during a flare up and then show the gradual recovery as the blood flow returns to my hands. I had to try to convey the same recovery process using still images and slide transitions. In the end, I decided that the price was right (it was free), it was fairly easy to use, and with the built in image libraries, I could absolutely see myself using this web tool in the future with my own students for digital assignments without having to worry about my students infringing on any copyright laws. Initially, I would limit them to the images provided within the tool, although eventually I could teach them how to import images of their own while using this as an opportunity to teach copyright awareness as well.
Creating my Digital Story:
Being that this was my own personal story, creating my script for the video was by far the easiest part. To make this more story like, I spent a bit of time setting the scene with my holiday location at the beginning of the video. I also felt that the images and the overall appeal of San Francisco itself acts an attention grabber for me at the start of the video. I struggled initially to get moovly.com working well on my computer. I was continually getting error messages and my computer would frequently lock up causing my moovly.com window to close and need to be restarted, usually with 10-20 seconds of video being lost as a result. Through a process of trial and error, I realized what was causing some of the glitches that I was experiencing. Moovly has an autosave function (which you can turn off by unselecting it). I kept this feature activated, but soon realized that whenever my project file was being automatically saved, I was unable to continue working on the video. It was when I continued to click and drag during these saving times that my screen would lock up and kick me out of the project entirely. I also noticed that if I tried to navigate too quickly between the screens in the web tool, it would also result in a lock up. I had to pay careful attention to the speed at which I navigated through the various tools when building my video. Having to wait during these automatic saving times and needing to slow down my usually speedy navigational habits did result in the project taking me longer than I expected it to, but I think that the advantages of this particular web tool outweighed the negatives for me personally. I have not used moovly.com on any other computer other than my home computer, so it may be entirely possible that the problems that I experienced throughout the video making process were due to my own device and were not the fault of the web tool itself.
A pleasant surprise that I had not been expecting was the built in narration feature of this web tool. Going into the project, I thought that I was going to have to save my audio files using one resource and then import them into moovly.com. Upon further exploration however, I discovered that I could record separate audio files from within the resource and then drag and drop them into the exact locations within my video timeline where I wanted the audio to fit into the displayed images. Having been required to use creative commons and public domain images for a number of assignments in the MET program now, I was able to locate most of the desired images that I was hoping to include in the telling of my story fairly successfully. Although it was a slow process, I was able to import and then incorporate a variety of images into my digital story. Due to the limits placed upon a free account, I eventually had to delete images from my ‘personal library’ inside of moovly.com in order to make room for additional pictures. Luckily, removing my imported images from the library did not also remove them from my video. I had to finesse the limitations of the free account here and there, but I was able to successfully make a digital story of almost five minutes in length in a way that met my hopes for my finished product.
My Educational Intentions:
I plan to use this video as a hook when I begin to teach the circulatory system to my class. I think that the video will serve as a means of grabbing their intention, sparking their curiosity, while also getting them asking good questions to find out more. I am lucky that the form of Raynaud’s Disease that I have does not have many repercussions beyond discomfort and inconvenience. There can however, be serious consequences for those suffering from the more extreme form of the condition. By providing my students with some rich questions after the video, I could really push their learning. I could have my students consider what the consequences of a severe or prolonged flare up might mean for a person suffering from this illness. We could also use the basic information that was shared in the video about this condition to make inferences about other similar medical conditions, such as, what is happening in the circulatory system when a person is suffering from hypothermia? Overall, I think that this video is suitable for use with a grade 5 class and will serve as an effective means of launching the portion of the human body unit in which we study the circulatory system.
As I have previously mentioned above, I would also like to use this video more indirectly as a model to illustrate for my students what a tool such as moovly.com can allow you to create online for free. Not necessarily within this particular Science unit, but in their work in one or more subject areas, the students will eventually complete an assignment in which they use a web tool to tell their own digital story.
References:
Bates A. W. & Poole, G. (2003). A framework for selecting and using technology. In A.W. Bates & G. Poole, Effective teaching with technology in higher education (pp. 75-108). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.