Module 4

Digital Storytelling seems to have evolved over the last five years or so. My first experience of digital storytelling was with the use of Photostory 3 for Windows. This application was useful for integrating sound, photos or scanned images with text to create a story. In the past my students used this tool for describing difference artworks and selecting appropriate music to represent the mood of the images. The problem though when I think back is that it was only ever shared with a small audience, the class. Web 2.0 tools that allow students to create Digital Stories allow them to reach a global audience. The tools which I have personally used include Voice Thread, Animoto and more recently iMovie on the Mac. Another aspect of digital story telling is Digital literacy. I was really very unaware in my earlier days of using and creating digital texts that there was a whole new set of skills that students need to develop to successful create and explore them. For example digital texts are not linear and students need to make choices about how they layout their text, what pathways and links they make available to their audience. Colour, font and layout is also another aspect to be considered. All of these skills need to be explictly taught for students to be able to represent meaning successfully.
As a final note, sharing digital texts has become much easier with the use of Web 2.0. My students have used Podbean to share their podcasts on our class blog and I have shared Vodcasts with them using a tool called Vodcast. This tool allows you to bookmark vodcasts according to theme. I collected a range of videos from various sites including YouTube, Vimeo, and Teacher Tube and about Australia and was them able to share them on the class blog. For younger students this worked well because they were not searching multiple sites to find content.