Digital Storytelling

This is my story created for the Digital Storytelling assignment.

It's titled "Moving On" and tells the story of my horrible first year of teaching.

So far, this has been my favorite assignment from the get go. I have enjoyed the others, but this was really fun to make. I liked being able to tell "my" story using voice, music, text, and photos.

I think this could be a really great assignment for the classroom. It fits in perfectly with the idea of memoir writing, and I am hoping to get enough time in the computer lab that I will be able to do this.  I'm really excited about the possiblities that go with this.

In class we talked about different things our stories could be about. Then we narrowed them down to one and talked it out with a partner. I think most teachers have had that year from Hell, and while mine might not be the absolute worst (I mean, I didn't get fired) I think it ranks up there pretty high. I wanted to tell this story, because it has shaped not only who I am as a teacher, but who I am as a person. And I think a lot of people can relate to that on some level.

Putting it together was actually pretty easy, even with the bumps in the road I inevitably hit. I spent a lot of time gathering my pictures, and then I saved them to Flickr since I wouldn't have the same computer at home. I saved what I had already done in Movie Maker to my flash drive.

Of course when I got home, the new version of Movie Maker that I started on isn't compatable with the one on my computer, so I had to start all over.  Oh and guess what, you can't right click and save photos on Flickr... so I had to gather all of my pictures all over again.

I have only used Movie Maker once before, and I don't remember it being exactly like this, so it took me a minute to figure it all out. I got all of my photos on there and then went through the timings until they were right.

I downloaded Audacity and did my recording, while playing music from my boyfriend's phone in the background. He's always so helpful, so I let him pick out the music, and I think it sounds pretty good with it.  I played the movie I had been working on so that the voice matched the show. After it was recorded, I just had to export it into a WAV file, which was super easy, and I was good to go.

Back to Movie Maker to add the sound, and Viola! The movie was made and all I had to do was click the publish button and it linked it up to YouTube. It took a little while for it to publish on there, but it finally did and looks awesome.

After a day of good conversations with classmates where I was encouraged to "just try it" and some help from my boyfriend about not getting stressed, I felt much better about making this than I did the other assignments.

I'm actually going to go back and try my hand at Photo Story and podcasting again now that I feel less overwhelmed by it.

Day 3 is in the books, and who knows what Day 4 is going to bring!