Digital Storytelling

Storytelling- Images of sitting around the campfire in the summer, the fireplace in your home in the wintertime, the dinner table with your family or saying good night to your children are conjured up in my head. Listening to fairy tales, passing a personal family story on from one generation to the next, creating a conspirative bond while telling and listening to ghost stories, personalizing a fact or concept by weaving a human element that creates a connection to the listener are just a few ways we are familiar with storytelling since we have been children. As educators we know that students thrive, if we take content and weave in a story that involves them or give them a glimpse in our own lives. All of these storytelling instances have one thing in common. They all are being told to a limited audience, they are all being told by a limited group of people.New tools allow us to expand the concept of storytelling in many ways.• Suddenly it is possible to give your voice an audience of millions by simply uploading your story to social networking sites.• Suddenly a moment in time can be captured with sound and video and passed on, even long after the storyteller is gone.• Suddenly adding many voices together can create a story. The story lies in the diversity of perspectives, points of view, and collective knowledge• Suddenly a story has the possibility to literally move on. The story takes on its own life, allowing all contributors and listeners to shape the story.

A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways -- using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) -- and share them with anyone they wish. A VoiceThread allows group conversations to be collected and shared in one place, from anywhere in the world. -- I think this is really great because teachers can put their own voice into this and students can interact in a new way. I know in one of my classes currently my teacher does this and it's really great because even though I'm not in the classroom it's still like the teacher is there in person teaching me. I also think it is just a fun way to learn and see things because it's being digitally done,

Slidecast is a great way for students to interact in a new way. It has students make powerpoints and show a new a creative side to their learning. This is a really fun tool to use because I can upload all my ideas and pictures into this mini slide and it is in a video. It's a lot of fun and I can't wait to work more with it.

Google Docs Assignment