I went to the session on Digital Story telling and that topic overarched various tools (that included VT) and described a particular approach to teaching. Aaron Smith, from the Media Commons, made a great argument for packaging learning around a or a series of narratives: we remember things better when told as a [interesting] story. Honestly I don’t have excellent notes from his presentation because it was fast-paced and hands-on. The impression did stick though and I was intrigued by his approach.
His second point was that he urged the use of open, online media tools because when the [R.I.] student leaves PSU, they may not have the ability to leverage the same resources they had as a student here. It’s important to show them that freely available tools may fit one’s needs perfectly fine. He shared a few tools, some of which we used during the hands-on portion (in no particular order):
- aviary.com: image, music, audio, etc. editor
- stickybits.com: barcode-based social networking
- junaio.com: augmented reality browser for web-enabled mobile devices with cameras
- paintmap.com: location-based database that maps paintings
- woices.com: location-based audioguides
- xtranormal: text-to-3D storyboards/videos
- jaycut.org: online video editor
- kaltura: online video editor
- dipity.com: interactive timeline creator/viewer
There were some familiar as well as new tools for me. We used aviary, jaycut, and flicker during our hands-on workshop to create interesting, short-video narratives about randomly-generated information bits from wikipedia.
As interesting as this session was, it’ll be a while before I could suggest this approach to faculty since I’m new to the development of this concept: digital storytelling. I do like the idea and will be something I will look to improve as a competency.
I attended the session as well. But have had several opportunities to attend trainings on this concept in the past.
It interesting to see how concepts stay the same but the tools have changed. In my earlier opportunities, I used a jpg with text. The next time, I made a ppt with with audio. This time we used web 2.0 tools.
So what has stayed the same? The story has to be the focal point. Without a carefully considered story, the product will be weak. Creating this narrative can be motivating for students, especially when they can create their own narrative to share with other students.