I think this is the most excited I have been about a course, since US Civil War in my undergraduate degree at Acadia University. What most excites me is that I will be able to transfer this knowledge immediately to the college.
Categories
Digital story tools
My Digital Story. Apologies to those who don’t like bugs
This part of the course exposed me to a whole new world of digital tools. I have seen some of them before such as Xtranormal through humorous youtube postings, yet never took the time to explore the tool. While doing some searching around I came across a digital story created using Prezi. I was immediately impressed by the unique way Prezi blends images and texts and transitions it all for a compelling and vertigo inducing story.
One of the most challenging aspects for me was picking and creating a story which would be educational in nature. I immediately defaulted to writing a story about myself. Consider it an introduction of sorts I would give to the students to let them know how I came to be standing in front of them. I am not a creative person and I soon found that writing a storyboard was not coming easily. As I was struggling to pull together a story I was also going through the 50 tools to pick one which fit with how I wanted to tell the story. Those which appealed to me combined audio, video and picture tools. Some of the tools seemed more daunting than others to learn which was a factor in deciding. I settled on Prezi as it was a tool that appealed to me visually combining text, images and video. Also as mentioned above I thought the overall visual was pretty cool and unique. My 12 year old son also thought this which served as some validation for me.
Had I just told this story to a class I think it would have been boring. A narrative of a bed bug is something you don’t come across every day and therefore may have had some humour appeal to it thus helping with the transfer of learning. After deciding on this particular story I realized that I am really only limited by my creativity in using it to teach. I could create a story about inanimate objects, guests, and any other aspect of the hospitality industry.
I think I know my students quite well and I could see some of them really enjoying this unique approach to learning. However, I think the time spent on such an assignment would take away from the learning objectives. I think most of the students would come away with a greater knowledge of a digital story tool, and not necessarily the subject matter/content created using the tool. I also think students who are not creative would spend too much time developing their story board and not enough focusing on the outcome.
Access does not seem to be an issue for the majority of the tools. Although if you want more capacity for your projects most of the tools required that you stepped up and purchased a higher level of access, like in Prezi.
This course has been immensely successful in improving my comprehension of education technology. I attribute this mostly to the pedagogical approach taken of learning by doing. Having had to go through all the tools and then figure it out has really benefited my learning.
Mike