Digital Storytelling Reflection

I liked how that it give the steps or criteria that makes a good digital story. Which are:
1. a point of view
2. a dramatic question
3. emotional content
4. economy
5. pacing
6. the gift of your voice
7. an accompanying soundtrack
or
1. Live Inside Your Story
2. Unfold Lessons Learned
3. Develop Creative Tension
4. Economize the Story Told
5. Show, Don’t Tell
6. Develop Craftsmanship

You can use these as a check list to see if what you have is what you need. This will make it so that your students will feel connected and feel the meaning behind the information instead of just getting the data off the surface. Students should be able to make their own digital story so that they can see and get a deeper understanding of how the topic actually affects them. It makes them get a personal connection with the material, and when we get emotion involved in learning students can learn a lot more effectively. I liked how they talked about still having the content the focus and not the technology. That the technology is a tool that is used in the background to better share you ideas, and what you have learned.
I watched a few digital stories from DigiTales and also the one about Where the Wild Things Are. It was interesting going through the book in that way. It was enjoy able and the music went well with it. One of the other movies I watched Patience, My Dear Man, Patience the sound and pictures were completely off which made it boring and I couldn't focus because the picture were so far behind. Another one I watched was Insurance of Life this was a good one that really had a personal experience and view to it. It seemed to flow well and to get the point across.

Site Refletion

I thought that it was pretty cool that Google search can be used as a calculator. I am a math major. The students probably won't be doing a lot of research but they could use the techniques to find activities, games or help on math subjects. The video talks about how versatile digital text is. At first I was thinking of the experiences I have had dealing with math in the digital format and it wasn't a pleasant experiences. It was cumbersome and non-user friendly. It is hard to take notes or do computation digitally. But things are and will be getting better. They are talked about in the video or article but it made me think of Tablet PCs. Where you can write fluidly in a digital format. they can take the hand written notes and type them up. These are the things that I see as being helpful in a mathematics classroom.

Looking at Google for Educators I didn't find a lot of things that i would use in my class room. None of the activities were for math and could really be used for it. I was a little disappointed in Google for not having any. The posters I thought were a good thing to have around so that the students would be able to see how to really get the most out of the site.

One of the things that I learned about designing a website that I had never really thought about was how it would look in different browsers, and at different resolutions. I liked the tip about doing it to the min and then the high resolution usually automatically re-size it. Or to use tables where it will stay at a fixed size.