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As I would for writing a traditional composition, in beginning my narrative, I thought about audience and my purpose for creating this piece. I planned, wrote, revised, performed more revision, edited etc. But also, I considered my mode, which was new for me. I knew it would impact how I wanted to craft my piece, and being unfamiliar with creating a digital story I felt on the edge, not knowing just what to expect. In the end, I expanded my thinking about audience. I was motivated, wanting to learn something new, something that might provide me a more powerful voice. It was an opportunity to be creative – in digital storytelling you can say more, in different mediums and levels, reaching your audience in ways that they might not even realize are affecting them. Describe your current teaching situation, as well as the rubric(s) you might implement for digital storytelling projects. Currently I split my day, teaching three hours in a first grade classroom and three hours as a Title I teacher working in five kindergarten classrooms. I would like to work with my first-graders to complete a class digital story. I'm not sure of the topic (possibly friendship or how to solve problems with others), but have complete confidence that my students will have lots to contribute. I will need to do most of the digital medium work. I also conduct professional development workshops for my district and the surrounding area. I see the digital medium as another way I can assist my colleagues in learning and accessing new literacies. I would like to have a conversation with my colleagues regarding assessment. A teacher's goals, the content area taught, and the age of the students would all have an impact on the criteria used to assess each project. I would want the students' voice/input as part of the assessment process. Did they accomplish in their digital medium what they were attempting to achieve? How does their project reflect their new learning? How has their understanding of composing in this layered digital medium evolved? Describe your project and your workshop experience. I am not exactly sure what drew me to selecting this particular topic. My mind is always processing what goes on in my classroom. Questioning and wondering what is said and done in my classroom follows me home each day. A comment about it being hard to stop a kid from learning struck a chord in me. I have carried that idea with me for several years, and I thought that using a digital medium might be a good way for me to explore the meaning behind it. When I began this project, I did not realize how hard it would be to stop. I never wanted to take breaks. There was always another effect, transition, or graphic that I wanted to create to make my message stronger. It was challenging trying to keep my narrative from getting too long. I wondered about saying too much, describing too much, because I wanted my pictures to do more than just match my words. I am not sure I did a very good job of making my pictures say more than my narrative. iMovie was maddening. Creating the narrative in GarageBand, putting it in iTunes, and then dragging it into iMovie was pretty straightforward. Before the workshop I had scripted my narratives and photos, however, I did go back to the Internet and find some graphics to update the ones I had considered. (Redoing, researching, and looking for something just a little bit better ate up a lot of my time.) I was able to put my photos in iPhoto and edit them without trouble. The transitions, however, were very difficult to use, because you always had to estimate how much time they would take out of the photo. There was not an exact formula. It was very hard to keep the timing aligned. The bigger my project became, the more problems I had, such as: iMovie would undo the timing adjustment I made in the selector, every time I tried to add seconds the movie would take seconds away, the movie wouldn't play all the clips that were in the timeline. I ended up deleting that copy of the iMovie and starting over again with the one I saved earlier. It took over an hour to burn a five-minute digital movie. The computer was moving very slowly.
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