A New Life

My response to "A New Life" can be heard below:

Digital Storytelling

Math Matters

Math Counts (if this does not load click on view full size)



Combinations

After completing three different digital stories, I think I have a much better idea of what resources to use in different situations. I found that each of the three sites that I created my digital stories had their own set of advantages and disadvantages. In each case this affected the type of story that I could tell and the type of special effects that I could use. Also, I found some of the sites less intuitive and harder to use than other sites. Overall, I feel that I am ready to utilize digital storytelling in my future classroom when I feel that it could be beneficial.

The first video that I created is entitled “Math Matters” and it was created at animoto.com. I found this site the easiest to use out of the three sites that I visited. All I really needed to do to create my story was find some pictures and put them in my movie. One disadvantage to animoto.com is that it is difficult to incorporate text into the storytelling. On the other hand, at animoto.com it is very easy to make the story emotional by looking through the wide variety of music that is offered. The story that I created at animoto.com was from the bottom of my heart and I feel that it came across as sincere and eye-opening (as I intended). All in all, I wanted to emphasize, through photographic examples, that math is prominent in the modern world and is not going away anytime soon. I think that animoto.com does a great job of structuring the photographs so the video comes off as professional. Something someone might notice about “Math Matters” is that it lacks humor. Since this was a movie created with a very important and meaningful message, I did not incorporate any humor. With the music I had chosen I felt humor probably would not have been appropriate anyway. In general, I had a very positive experience making my movie through animoto.com.

The second video that I created is entitled “Math Counts” and it was created through scrapblog.com. The video that I created at this site was mostly in response to those that feel mathematics (especially advanced mathematics) is a useless endeavor. I tried to site clear examples throughout this video on how mathematics is used at both a basic and advanced level. I hope that I provided eye-opening information through the evidence that I provided. Also, in the second slide I added some humor which I think is a nice segue into the bulk of my video. I would say that the biggest advantage of scrapblog.com is how easy it is to incorporate text into the digital story. Having the ability to incorporate text made it very easy for me to site examples (next to pictures) and provide transitions. One of the disadvantages of scrapblog.com is that it does not have a very wide range of background music from which to choose. Personally, I am happy with the music that I have, but I felt somewhat lucky that I actually found it. Overall, I feel that scrapblog.com will be a very nice resource for me if I need to tell a digital story that requires a combination of both text and pictures.

The final video that I created is entitled “Combinations” and it was created through voicethread.com. I found this site the most challenging to use out of all three of the sites. This is because I felt like this site requires one to have very powerful images that are capable of creating discussion. I felt that the best use of this site for a teacher (especially a math teacher) would be to create summary of lesson that was taught in class. Thus, in “Combinations” I summarize (through a story) what an advanced algebra class might discuss during a combinatorics chapter in their text book. In this summary I let my enthusiasm come through in the video in order to make it a somewhat emotional experience for the viewer. As a teacher I might post summaries like this on a website to help students that are struggling to better understand concepts that were taught in class. The major disadvantages of this site are that it is very difficult to use text and import other audio. Therefore, I feel that almost too much is done through the voice of one person. The coolest part about this site was the fact that one could draw on the picture as he or she spoke to make the experience somewhat interactive. I believe that when I do this in my video it clarifies concepts immensely.

Currently, I am very happy to have created these videos. I think that they all could be used in a future classroom of mine and I am very happy with all of them. Although it was a lot of hard work to learn these sites I now feel that I am ready to continue to find ways to tell emotionally captivating digital stories.