Digital Storytelling

Anytime I am asked to write about a topic, it is a somewhat painful process. I enjoy writing, but can labor over what it is I want to convey. When I taught 4th, 5th and 6th grades, I always tried to be sympathetic to kids who shared my indecisiveness. 

The digital storytelling experience was much the same. I deliberated over a few topics and selected one, my husband's fight to overcome cancer. I collected many pictures from my home computer and put them into a file. As I collected, the topic became very personal - too much so for our class audience (though it may be created as a holiday gift...). So my idea morphed into focusing on the benefits of the American Cancer Society. As that idea simmered in my brain, it changed, yet again, into the general idea of the benefits of volunteering. Perusing my pictures for volunteering, I came across many pictures of my husband and kids on our travels. Both of my boys are excellent travelers who enjoy seeing new places, trying new food and experiencing different cultures and lifestyles. My very close grade school friend and her sons are very different from mine in regards to travel and exposure to other cultures. Both families traveled to the Dominican Republic a few years ago and my friend was happy to stay on the all-inclusive resort, eat at the American-style restaurant while my boys, who were only eight and four at the time, and I ventured off the beaten path and explored the island on our own. 

That made me wonder where my spirit of adventure came from, as it was not part of my upbringing. Though my maternal grandmother had a spirit for adventure, but on more of a low key level, and people say I take after her.

Once I really thought about it, I realized that my lust for travel originated from my fourth grade social studies teacher and her teaching. After I had selected the topic, the writing of the script was pretty easy. Searching the web was also fairly easy. Timing pictures and cutting clips, as well as adding titles, music and narration took some trial and error and watching video tutorials, but the project was coming together. 

I started production at 6:30 am Saturday morning and by 2:00, the video was more and less complete. There were a few edits that I needed to make on Sunday, but when I tried to open it, only one picture appeared, and no music or narration. I played around and did all of the tech tricks I knew: quitting the application, shutting down and restarting. I brought my computer to a more tech savvy friend who was able to reopen an older version, prior to my adding music and narration. I was thrilled!

Then I brought my computer home to continue working, and it had reverted to only showing the one picture and not playing. I put in help desk requests to my school's tech department and heard back that it was an iMovie formatting issue, which was what your response indicated, and a tech person would help me Monday morning.

Sure enough, there were multiple iMovie versions on my computer and I was using the oldest version as it was the one that was in my dock, so the one I automatically used. The downside is that I will need to re-learn the program, as there are many more bells and whistles on the new version and its layout is different. I wish I had devoted this time on the newest version, but I wasn't savvy enough to think about different versions. 

Afterward, I was informed that in the future I should not use the district's tech department help desk for my own class problems. As this was the first time I had requested help for the class, this flabbergasted me. The district offered and financially supplemented this course and it was to learn things to use as a teacher in my classroom. Frustrating. Not sure how I will get any future issues addressed should they come up. 

Thankfully, I am happy with what I learned. The process was pretty cool and I enjoyed unearthing a bit of myself through the vehicle of digital storytelling. iMovie is not a tool I will use with my students, but I make slideshows for my students and parents and can now jazz them up a bit and I hope to devote time to compile my own family memories via this tool.