Digital Project Reflection

I am very pleased with my digital project. Many teachers have created a global classroom using the tool Moodle as a vehicle. I never thought I would move into the 21st century but this gave me an opportunity to create a page to publish students' works and to document their efforts.

In the meantime, I needed to relearn some of the tools and explore new ones. I incorporated Wordle and Xtranormal into the page, having learned about them in this class. I also needed to learn and to teach students how to use power point to create their book commercial slide to place at the beginning of their Photo Story. The detail about saving their file to jpeg was an important one that was overlooked more than once. Students searched the web for just the right pictures to advertise their stories. Some searches were too specific; some too vague. The patient searcher tended to find just what they were looking for and it showed in their graphic grade. We realized it was important to create a folder first to put the pictures into and to rename the folder with the book title.

Students then imported their pictures into PhotoStory, dragged them into the correct sequence, and then recorded their dialog for each. They soon realized that their care with having written a final copy on their storyboards helped them do this step smoothly. Some tried to add music and more often than not, had it turned up too loudly so we had to edit the volume so we could hear them speaking. I have two students who have speech issues and who were uncomfortable speaking into the microphone. They chose to type their script and to have music playing in the background. One student typed his for effect and you will see in Flags of Our Fathers.

A final challenge was to save the project as a video and after a few tries, students who learned the correct procedure helped others. Vicki created a folder for me on the MS Library site to move their Photo Stories into.

Unfortunately, I learned that discs in digital cameras don't always work. The pictures I took to document their work, 38 to be exact, were on the camera and Joe taught me how to upload them into my computer, but my computer only brought in 5. I redid it and next it brought in only three. Vicki checked it out and there was only one left. Fortunately, I had used my son's camera one day and had enough to create the animoto. Both my seventh and eighth grade students are featured. :)