Ok. I know. I've been really bad at this blogging thing the past couple of weeks. But I have a few of what I think are pretty interesting topics to post about in the next couple of days. First, you must understand, that this past week was the second last week of school and assignments have been piling like crazy!! But now that the Brittany pity party train has left the station, let's get down to business.
The one main thing that I would like to discuss about this last week is digital storytelling. I know that I have already discussed this, however, I have had a lot more time to experiment with this and explore what it entails. In two classes, I have had the opportunity to work with this many times. There have been three assignments with video editing, music editing, and slide show production in the past couple of weeks. The first assignment was the one story sentence that I had explained in a previous post. The other is a video editing assignment done in my ICT class, and the other is a slide show or video that tells a story, either your own made up story or a retelling of an existing story.
I had a LOT of fun with the video editing assignment in my ICT class. I completed this assignment with my friend Rae. There has been this phase that has gained a lot of attention again recently. Maybe you have heard of it. It's called Mario Kart. A game that I once played when I was young is now becoming popular among some people again. One day, Rae and I were sitting at her place after school playing Mario Kart with a delicious.... iced tea... and thought "wouldn't it be fun to use this assignment to create a Mario Kart movie preview?" So that's what we did. We printed and cut out pictures of Mario Kart characters, and used a method called "stop motion" combined with taped Mario Kart races. "Stop motion" is when you slightly move pieces and take a picture of their new location every time, and then put the picture together as a video and it looks like these pieces are moving. For further information on stop motion, YouTube has quite a few videos. Anyway, we used a variety of methods to complete our video. We used pictures, videos, audio, and animations created by PowerPoint that were then created into a video clip that we then placed into our video. We even created our own "production" logo through Paint and Word. To put our entire video together, we used Movie Maker for Windows. I have had experience with iMovie in the past, however, with the lack and difficult access to a Mac computer, we decided to use Movie Maker. At first, I wasn't too fond of this, however, the more I used it, the more I realized what you could do with it. Now that I have experience with both, I feel that Movie Maker is just as good and easy to use as iMovie.
For my last assignment with digital storytelling, I decided to create a video to "Love You Forever" by Robert Munsch. I wanted to create my own story, however, with everything else going on, I lacked the motivation and creativity to come up with something that I really liked and wanted to use. Yes, I took the easy way out with using something already done. In my defence, I think it turned out great. To do this, I used PowerPoint. I found a nice light coloured background and used black text to tell the story one line at a time. After each slide, and every major event in the book, I had baby pictures of myself with my family. I paired a piano version of Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" with the presentation which I felt really added to the story. It is amazing what a little bit of music can do to set the mood of something. The only thing I would have changed with this assignment would have been the pictures. If I had thought about it before, I would have found baby pictures, pictures of when I was two years old, nine years old, a teenager etc to go along with the actual story. My mom and I got to looking through old pictures and used all of the ones that she said I should use, and a few more that I decided to put in (sorry mom, nice hair by the way).
My experiences with digital storytelling have all been positive and I think that this is something that I would use in my classroom. My CT in my first teaching placement created a classroom video every year instead of a paper year book. This averaged about 45 minutes long and contained picture and videos of everything the students did throughout the year. I thought that this was a lot of work, and I think I was right, but it seems totally worth it. Making videos is one of those things that I need to do well. I don't really stop until I feel that it is perfect. In that aspect, this is probably a bad, but amazing, project for me to take on, especially a 45 minute one. However, this is something that students may have forever and can watch whenever they want. Students love videos and seeing their accomplishments and memories.
I think I have rambled on long enough for one night. I will post with more interesting things tomorrow! Here's lookin' at you kid!
-Brittany
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