Digital Story

What?
Digital Stories combine pictures, music, and narration to create feelings, tones, and meaning that cannot be brought together through other media techniques or teaching styles. Meaningful learning is more likely to occur through this collaboration of music, moods, and visuals. There are many different movie making programs available to teachers, students, and anyone that wants to make a movie about something. I chose to use Photo Story 3 which is a very simple and user friendly program. I really liked the ease of putting together a movie with this program because students could use this program with very little instruction to create assignments and projects for their school work. I think Digital Stories are great for most any content area because of the infinite possibilities that can be produced. However, subjects such as history and language have some really moving topics that work well with Digital Stories and can really get the students involved.
It was difficult to find a topic to create a Digital Story about mathematics. Although not unachievable, it does require much thought and creativity. I chose to take a field trip with my students and show them some of the geometric shapes in the real world. I thought this would be affective to help create interest at the beginning of the year in geometry as the students could see how geometry plays a part in their world. I would really like to show this video as an introduction and then assign the students to create something similar relating mathematics to their lives and portraying that through a digital story.

So What?
Through this assignment I once again had my eyes opened to the endless possibilities and different teaching techniques that are out there and available to me. In all of the many math classes that I've been through, never once has a movie been played that helped me better understand my content area. I like this idea of digital stories because it is new and fresh for the students of today and can grasp their attention using the things that they so love, technology.
Through this experience, I was able to really work on developing my skills with creating digital-age learning experiences.

Now What?
One of my professional goals is to teach math in a way that has really been used before but that is also very effective in order to help students really learn math. I think that digital stories could be a good way to really get them engaged in the learning process and expecially in application type problems. I will also continue to stretch my creativity in order to help students best learn and connect with the concepts that I will be teaching them.