Welcome to Open House Room 355 ELA

This is the final version for class of my digital story that I created to share at Open House with incoming parents and students.  I decided to use Windows Movie Maker for this project.  I love my final product since I was able to add narration.  I thought it was going to be a struggle to match my voice to each picture.  Therefore, I decided to record each pictures narration separately.  While this made recording and re-recording much easier however, when you play the digital story you can somewhat hear the difference between each pictures narration.  I do plan to update it before the actual Open House in September with more specific information.

I believe it is very appropriate for my school and me.  I personally feel this is perfect for me since I strongly dislike speaking in front of anyone other than children.  For this digital story, I was thinking of the parents that might not be able to attend the Open House and how I could relay information to them.  I thought this would be useful for that purpose. 

If I were to do this again, which I plan to, I will need to have all the pictures in one file, know exactly what I want to say, and have a better microphone.  I think I would try to match the music to the pictures but I did not see the need to since I had narration.  If I were to use this technology in my class, I think my students would pick up how to use is quickly.  The challenge would be that it would need to be quiet if they were to record narration while using Windows Movie Maker.

I am excited and proud to share with you my final product.  Please feel free to leave feedback.

Ruff! Rough Draft of My Digital Story

For my digital story, I had two choices; I could create a digital story for my Accelerated Reader program or for Open House for the beginning of school.  I decided to create my first digital story to share at Open House.  For starters, I strongly dislike public speaking.  I can talk to my students all day long: however, if I have to address my peers in a public forum, I become extremely anxious.  Either way this rough draft of my digital story had my head spinning.

I began using VoiceThread but I wanted to add seamlessly music and not just my voice.  So then, I tried using Photo Story 3 and Windows Movie Maker at the same time.  I uploaded all the pictures and screenshots and began moving them around.  Photo Story 3 is linear and when moving pictures around was cumbersome.  However, Movie Maker was nonlinear and I felt like I had more space to maneuver. 

The hardest part of this journey was taking pictures that I thought would be useful in my digital story.  However, the trickiest part of creating my digital story was trying to do the narration.  I had issues with the sound on my laptop.  Then I would try to record my voice and the microphone stopped working.  I decided to try music.  Since I am extremely indecisive, selecting music that I thought would match took more time than necessary.  Below is my "ruff" draft. I intend to add my voice little by little maybe one slide at a time.

Storybird Time

During my last EDUC 584 class, I had the opportunity to create a story with my peers Michelle and Juan using the online digital story-telling tool Storybird.  It was the first time I had used a tool such as this to create a story.  It was difficult to create a story on the spot based on someone else’s pictures.  However, once we selected an artist our story came together quickly.   

I am proud of our accomplishment, so proud that I showed it to my six graders the next day.  I wanted to show them what I created in class the night before and to get some feedback.  I told them that we created the story off the top of our head and had it done within a half hour of starting.  After I read the story to them, they asked when they would get the opportunity to make one of their own!  They did say they thought the story was nice and immediately noticed the students on the cover page.  They had so many questions about the artwork and where did we get the names for the characters.  I reminded the students about the short stories they wrote at the beginning of the year.  I told them if I had known about Storybird before, they could have used it to create their original stories to share online.  I definitely plan to use this tool with students in the future. I can see them selecting pictures first then building their story using a plot chart.  They can practice including conflict, dialogue, characterization, and setting. As an ELA teacher, I see the many possibilities for using Storybird in my classroom.