Digital Story 2

What?
We are learning how to use Photo Story. We will use this program to create our digital story. We will present our digital stories to the class for our Final.



So What?

As a teacher, this means that I am learning yet one more way to incorporate media into a better functioning and learning classroom. As a student, this means that right now I am working with Rachel to create a digital story about the propaganda used in America before the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan in WWII. We are learning how to use the photo story program on the school computers, and we have been working on finding good pictures to demonstrate our main points about the deceitful propaganda used at a certain time in history. As a colleague, this doesn't mean much for me now, since I am just a school janitor, but if they ever needed a presentation on how poorly taken care of the classrooms are by the students, I could use photo story to emphasize how messy and irresponsible the students are when it comes to cleanliness and sanitation.
We are doing this to open up more options to teach any of the subjects we will teach when we are hired. In my other classes, this can apply to me, because I could use digital stories for projects, final exams, or for my presentation in my math class of an instructional method to teach a certain math concept. In my life in general, this applies because I can make picture-movies with music for weddings using a new program, instead of taking up so much space with my imovies on my computer. This technology means, to me, that there are much more powerful ways of teaching than direct teaching and lecturing. This can be a means of showing examples, illustrating different perspectives, looking at multiple points of view, and much more. To my colleagues, this technology won't mean much now because I don't have any colleagues. I am one janitor that is used for the art department and I have two bosses. I could offer my bosses, who are UVU art teachers, some help with saving the work of their students throughout the year by taking pictures of all the favorite student pieces of the semester and putting them to music on a digital story. This could be a gift to the students for their portfolios and could be helpful in the future.


Now What?

To my future students, this technology means that they will be able to try less hard to pay attention. It will come more naturally for the parts of understanding that include these digital stories. They will be able to create a file cabinet in their mind to store later information that comes from the topics presented in the digital stories. This technology changes my current schema by introducing it to new ways of thinking how to give learning in a more productive and diverse way. This will help me be a better teacher by helping me improve the quality of my lesson plans with new innovative ways of presenting and creating information.
Some of the assignments I could give my students in the future would be the creating of these digital stories. I could tie it into an art lesson. What art work the students have done for a certain social studies unit, I could take pictures of them and put them into a computer for all of them to create a digital story telling of the Civil War or whatever unit we happen to be on. They could collaborate with their peers in class and outside of class making more art work, finding music, and putting it all together on the digital story program. This will help me become a better teacher because my students will enjoy coming to class, they will in turn be well behaved, and I will be able to have confidence running my classroom in a productive, diverse, different, fun, and learning filled manner. I could be a better colleague by offering my ideas and putting together an entire grade digital story day where the classes combine and get to work in groups of students that include student from any of the other classes. It will be nice for the students and the teachers to deal with different people and offer their knowledge to multiple groups under constructive group work settings. In the department, digital stories could be a fun way to start a meeting, a celebratory way to end each term. Digital stories could be a means of creating more positive relationships among the students, the teachers, the department, and other school members.