February 24:Digital Story

Digital stories are an opportunity to tell a story that has directly impacted you. It is a way of telling a story in a way that is different from any other. Digital stories allow you to use narration and images with music to make a bigger impact than simply reading a book. Digital stories are not like a childrens book, they are individual, creative, make an impact, change perspectives, and enlighten those that experience them.

The digital stories you showed in class really stuck with me and some of them were more powerful than many things I have learned about those subjects previously. I think this is a daring way to teach and involve our students to make it more real to them. I think digital stories are great because they give the individual creating it voice. We have the opportunity to show our view of different things and how we feel about them. This type of sharing is so important to each individual that knowing how to create digital stories and sharing those skills with students will give them a way to express themselves even at a young age.

Digital stories will be something I would like to use in my classroom in the future, especially if I can get to a point where they aren't so hard to create. I think learners now are so visual and feel they need to be entertained to learn. Digital stories will be a way for me to reach some of my students that I might not reach otherwise. I also think digital stories would be fun to use to create a classroom community. Using digital stories as a spotlight on a student would be so much more fun than a poster. I think having this skill will be useful to me in the future to help colleagues around me learn to be more innovative in the classroom.

February 17:Vidcast Review

The name of my vidcast series would be called The Safety Sessions. I decided this could be a series of vidcast created by myself or students to help us remember important safety tips and rules. This series addresses the health core curriculum outlined by the state for second grade students. More specifically it addresses standard 1 which says: Students will develop a sense of self and it also addresses objective 1 which says: Describe and adopt behaviors for health and safety.
In my vidcast I decided to highlight seat belt safety. I was inspired to choose this topic for my vidcast because I was in a small car accident just a couple weeks ago. I was glad I had my seat belt on and that everyone was safe. Seat belts are so important to our safety especially because we spend so much time in cars throughout the day. I feel this topic would benefit children immensely. With the help of this simple video students could help other children learn how to wear their seat belt and be a big help in keeping others safe.
Some potential drawbacks of potentially using this series in my own classroom is that the series I created was made for children in younger grades. Children in 6th grade would not appreciate someone showing them how to put a seat belt on, how to wash their hands, or how to cross the street.
A future plan for this series would be to create an assignment in which students can create their own vidcast with help from a teacher. Students would be given options for the vidcast they could create and would be able to share their projects with others. I think this series could be very fun for younger children to work on to share their perspectives on what it means to live a safe life. 

This blog post can also be found as a google doc here. 

February 10-Vidcast

This week we were introduced to vidcast. This is kind of like podcast in that is a technology tool students can access themselves away from school that has audio but now we are adding visual. There are a few different ways this can be used. You can use a program like photostory where you simply use still pictures and add audio recording to them and create a slide show of sorts. Other things like flip video cams can be used to film short movies that can be uploaded as a vidcast. The last tool we learned about briefly was jing. This tool seemed a little confusing to me but may not be so confusing once I actually have time to play around on it but it is basically used for taking screen shots on your computer and sharing them. This tool also makes editing fairly easy.

I think we are learning how to do vidcast because it is a simply tool that could really enhance learning in our classroom. I know so many students that would love to do something hands on like creating a vidcast. I think this technology could actually really help students that may be working on projects outside of class. I could create a quick vidcast to explain an assignment to someone else in a work group. Vidcasts could also be used for presentations in many classes which would be more exciting than just lecturing.

This information will impact my classroom because I think this would be an easy tool to help students learn technology and incorporate many other subject areas. Using vidcast could be a great collaborative assignment for students to work on in teams and would be something fun that they could use to learn another subject. I also think this would be a fun tool for other teachers to learn so that they can create different vidcast they would like to use in lessons. The possibilities for fun projects and class community building opportunities using vidcast is endless. Vidcast really opened my eyes to a fun way to learn in the classroom that will make learning more exciting and interactive. Plus when students are creating things from the learning that has already taken place the concepts are just retained even more which is what we are working towards as teachers.