Week 7: Activity 1

It’s been awhile since I’ve been live simply because this technology learning is overwhelming and challenging and I find that it is a bit of a time sink – once  I get started on something I move very slowly through it and often without much progress.  This week’s activity was no exception.  I’m a true believer in storytelling and the concept of digital storytelling is not new to me.  Beginning – Middle – End – include components of a good story, you know the drill –  plot, character development, problem, resolution, upload a few images and voila!  Digital story complete.  If only it were that simple.  Sadly, I have not had many opportunities to write stories with a class or teach story writing and only have an idea of the steps necessary to actually write one – never mind create digitally.  So – no time like the present.  Like everything else this school year, it’s time, again, to get out of my comfort zone and start playing.  

I decided to try and tell the story of what is happening in my Social Skills group at school.  Because I am swamped with work these days, I’m trying to be efficient and anything I create here, I want to be able to use at school.  My plan is to share this “digital story” with my group at the start of our next lesson this week and am looking forward to their input and possible changes I may need to make.  To be honest, I am quite uncertain as to the “legalities” of sharing these images on this wordpress site – I imagine that I need parent consent (which I have) to use pictures and videos of my students throughout my learning in this course, but I’m not sure if I need more than that.  If any of you have insight regarding this issue – I’d love to hear from you because posting things online makes me nervous with regards to digital footprints and such.  

I used a program called “Thinglink”.  It was recommended to me by a behaviour consultant from the ministry who works with students on the autism spectrum.  She is someone I highly respect, so took her advice and jumped right in (full 35$ fee and all!).  Much to my dismay, after spending the money, the program is not user friendly and it has taken me quite some time to get anything done.  It had the “sales” features of a great digital storytelling/educational resource and I wanted to have something that I would use often and know well.  I think it will take me a good long time to figure this one out the way I want to know it, but now that I’ve spent the money, I guess I have some motivation.  Mostly I was disappointed because it was not easy to embed the videos that I created to go with the images and the link you have here is void of any video.  My hope is to keep building on it, and it might show up in my “exemplars” assignment if I can figure it out.  From what I can tell so far, I can only add videos from YouTube or other online sources, and cannot add my own.  Again, my fear in publishing any of my students work to YouTube exists and I’m not sure that is the right avenue to getting my videos into the platform.  

I most likely should have used Photo Story (also available on my computer) and worked with that program but I ended up with “Thinglink” so have a look and let me know your thoughts.