Photo Show

Make your own photo slideshow at Animoto.

This photo show is an opportunity to show students my trip to New Orleans. It can be a modern slide show and a chance to give students a "digital field trip" to places they are not able to directly experience.

Epals

Epals is a web-based interactive site for the use of K12 teachers, students and parents. Through this site, each of these groups is able to interact with another for the sake of successful learning.

Features such as Epails SchoolM@il allow teachers to share information with their students and parents to promote safe and efficient communication.

Learningspace is a tool similar to Googledocs, however more focused towards the use by elementary and secondary students. It allows teachers to facilitate learning through group projects and shared learning experiences through a multitude of variables (global collaboration, school clubs, etc.). Through this tool, students are able to share documents, read from wikis and blogs, and submit work to a teacher.

Lastly, through Epals Global Community, users are able to search from global classrooms similar to their own to get ideas for projects, or learning styles. Also, a forum from National Geographic shares project ideas for all users facilitated through monitored emails.


Epals and the tools it provides for users can be used to show and share students how the learning of topics that they are familiar with is done throughout the world. The use of the National Geographic forum and forums from other teachers gives all types of users and interactive and technological viewpoint towards new information. I enjoy that students are not only able to receive new information from this site, but also to share projects with group or club members, their teachers and parents all while being monitored in a safe and efficient manner.

Bookr

Learning a Second Language
Borrowed from Flikr archive user: Jen

This digital storybook can be used in the beginning of the year of at the first level or learning a new foreign language to help students understand the meaning and value behind learning a new language. Often students who dont find value in what they are learning will have difficulty in or wont put effort into their studies of that subject.
If I were to use digital story telling, I would have students create a similar slide show of researching the uses of a foreign language on the Internet, or have them make a "What I did over the summer" story to have them narrate at the beginning of the year a small amount of information about themselves. The objectives of the majority of digital storytelling lessons or projects should focus on getting to know more about a student while checking to see that they have understood and accomplished the task or content.

Digital Storytelling

Digital Storytelling is a means of creating a technological narrative through the use of pictures, video, voice and text.  The use of this innovative tool always professors, teachers, students and the everyday technologically aware person to put emotion and depth into their work. In the article,Educause. the author states,  "Digital stories can be instructional, persuasive, historical, or reflective" and "can be applied to nearly any subject."It is said that digital story telling is best done by a single individual, making it more personal, but can be applied to group projects.

How to get started:From Educause

1. Start with a script.
2. "The storyteller then assembles rich media to support the ideas and emotions in that script, including music or other audio effects, personal or public-
   domain images, animations or video, and other electronic elements. "
3. "The storyteller pieces together and edits the digital story, creating a short movie, usually about two to four minutes long, in one of various file formats."

The use of digital story telling can be used across a wide variety of subject areas and ages. From inside the classroom subjects, to more personal at-home projects this tool can showcase vacations, study abroad experiences for students, or other personally showcased ideas. When it comes to this tool, resources and possibilities are virtually endless.


Photo by digistorytellin's photostream