Friday, February 8, 2013

ETMOOC Beauty -- digital storytelling from elementary to the techno-genies


The Digital Writing session with Darren Kuropatwa for #ETMOOC this morning jolted me awake.  I was expecting a laid back session, not to find myself whisked into a virtual chat room for 5 minutes to review a blog prompt, record thoughts about it, then send those thoughtful musings to our moderator.  That was fast. 
That wasn’t all though.  Before I could catch my breath, we ETMOOCers were each sent off with our phones for 3 minutes to capture 5 seconds of beauty around us.  Then, we each sent our clips to Mr Kuropatwa.  Many of us (though not all, which was actually encouraging since I managed to spell Kuropatwa wrong  in dropittome and missed out) were able to do this.  Mr. K. used iMovie to pull together these clips and some audio with seeming ease and voila, now we can all see etmoooc Beauty on YouTube.  I’m may even be a minor viral hit.  It’s actually impressively nice and it happened in about 20 minutes. 
The movie surely made the point that our stories are more attention-getting when we add video and audio.  In addition, the collaborative session showed that, with some practice, pretty complex pieces can come together rather easily.  I was happily surprised with the way the morning turned out.
This is a spunky MOOC.  If in doubt, check out the LipDub created after the first week.   These are fun people.  I am looking forward to collaborating with them.  It’s also a group that ranges from real beginners to real techno-wonders.  Anyone can be comfortable here, so I’m happy to contribute what I can, when I can.
I decided to quickly use today’s inspiration to create a sample 5-photo story, since we will be working on 5-photo stories next week using our classroom iPads.  The students have already picked a small moment they want to memorialize from the Winter Break.  They have been thinking about how to tell the story about this moment in 5 images.  The week, they will create the images and tell the story using the screencasting app, Explain Everything. 
They will have a limited amount of time to create and publish their stories, so I limited the amount of time I used as well.  I took about 20 minutes. I had access to what my students will have: I found the first photo on my camera roll, so unfortunately it’s not properly attributed, I used an old-fashioned book for the second photo, I used Scribble Press for the fourth photo, and for the rest I used the iPad camera.  It’s doesn’t have audio and it’s not going to go viral, but it’s a digital tale of a fun moment in time.


















 

No comments:

Post a Comment