Digital Stories

Here we are continuing with our digital stories assignment and I'm asking myself, "Why can't all homework be this fun?" It seriously is a blast, at least our presentation is a blast. We have been finding lots of photos and screening them, and I have found the perfect music for our presentation. It is basically just a ice breaker for teaching about the American poet Robert Frost.

I have been listening to the other groups and they all seem pretty excited about it themselves. I think this is a technology that is going to become more available and more advanced very quickly. That means it will be easier to use and easier for us to integrate into our class rooms. Like power point. It started out as really neat and got easier and more available and now it's everywhere. I expect to use it, even as just a hobby, I showed some of the preliminary work on our project to my family members and they all loved it. Hopefully I can get some sort of similar response from my students.

The great thing about this technology and me is that I whole heartedly believe in oral readings. Especially of poems or loved lines from stories and novels. But a lot of class rooms have gotten away from that. These digital stories might create a new way to bring those oral readings back into the spot light. It will continue to be great fun for me to make these videos, and to assign students to make them for poems we are studying. As I save these up I may be able to lend them to other teachers when they are teaching a similar topic.

Movie
Did You Know 3.0

In all honesty I felt like 3.0 was less streamined than it's predecessors. It felt alot more like a smattering of statistics than a call to arms about technilogoically arming our students with skills and knowledge. I understood it's point, especially having see the previous, but I don't think it made it very well.
It still means we need to be quick on our feet as teachers. We need to be aware of what is going on in the world, and in the laboratory. We need to be up to date on how to equip our students with the knowledge that will help them succeed. This seems a little difficult for me as an English teacher. I'm not going to be teaching them about how to use technology, necessarily. But I will try to continue the age old tradition in English, of creating critical thinkers and empathetic citizens. Hopefully I can do this through the use of technology so that the students will acquire the information in mediums that they like, and are used to using.