Digital Storytelling: Old Testament

Freshmen all had the chance to create a short video using PhotoStory. Each pair of students retold a story either traditionally or modernized. Photos were downloaded from Creative Commons, and then uploaded into PhotoStory. They wrote a script and then narrated the photos. They included a personal reflection at the end of their stories. A rubric and self evaluation was completed and submitted to the their teacher.

Tech Skills Learned:

• Searching for images
• Saving images to flash drive
• collaborative writing with Google Docs (optional)
• PhotoStory development
• audio recording
• saving as a video file .wmv

Benefits:

• Creativity
• Collaboration
• Oral speaking skills: speaking clearly and professionally
• Working quickly to complete task within time constraints

Challenges

• absenteeism/leaving early for sports
• their partners had to do more of the work
• Communicating the saving process needed to be very clear and visual using projector
• pacing students to prevent them from creating too large a project

Overall, the freshmen are very computer literate, and many required simple clarification about processes. Many are Mac users who just need to see how to do something in Windows.