Sailing: A Family Tradition
In creating my digital story, Sailing: A Family Tradition, I had the opportunity to first experiment, to various degrees, with several different visual meaning platforms. For example, I tried Visual.ly, Easel.ly, Animoto, Thinglink, and VoiceThread. Unique to each platform, are inherent qualities that lend themselves well to images, graphics, stories, photos, and other forms of text. After playing around with each of these platforms, I opted to use VoiceThread as it allowed me to create the publication I desired utilizing a variety of my own family photos and personalizing it with my own voice. What's especially neat about VoiceThread, is that after I share the link with my relatives, they, too, will also be able to add their own voices and verbiage to the various photos. It'll be exciting to see what others choose to say and add on to the VoiceThread. Additionally, this project and the knowledge of these various platforms will be fun to use in both my career and my personal life by keeping a digital scrapbook of family outings.
In the school realm, the possibilities are endless for ways these
digital platforms may be used. The simplicity of VoiceThread will be
enticing to use with all ages and with those unfamiliar with digital
storytelling. Especially for struggling
readers and writers, I find that VoiceThread will allow students to share their
story verbally, with ease, and then we can address the process of converting it
to written text. Frequently, struggling
writers are stumped at the get-go with the pencil in hand. Letting them talk first to get their thoughts
out, removes the physical and oft-times arduous obstacle of writing.
When matching images with print in the VoiceThread, I found it
unbelievably easy and fun! The software allows you to choose photos, text, URL,
or other content from your computer. Once those are uploaded, you have
the option of adding text, audio, or even doodling directly on the image.
This creates an interactive experience for both the publisher and their
audience: as the audience has the opportunity to supply additional
comments on the site. I can foresee the
interactive qualities being fun as students learn how to respond positively to
classmates’ VoiceThreads. Moreover, I
noticed that the settings in VoiceThread allow for modifying who can view your
work, thus opening up the author’s audience to people in other parts of the
world! This has very exciting potential
for applications.
While composing this VoiceThread, I ran into a few minor difficulties. Attempting to embed a sailing video as well
as learning how to delete and edit my own recorded audio once it had been saved
proved challenging. The software
continued to recognize my voice recording as a new post to the image and therefore
added it as such. I’ll have to continue
to refine my skills with this software to use it efficiently with my students.
I also created a sailing lexicon “Wordle” on the website
Wordle.com. This was fun and could be
used in so many ways in the classroom to help teach new vocabulary. Moreover, I tried the Visual Thesaurus
website and found that to be a wonderful resource, too. I would like to have figured out a way to
embed that in my VoiceThread as well.
Suffice to say, there are so very many more exciting digital
technologies to learn and websites to utilize
in my teaching.
Having
been an avid, recreational sailor, I realized I never knew the terms associated
with the points of sail; therefore, I wanted to incorporate my findings into
this project. Initially, having the
innate desire to learn these terms motivated me to seek out the answers. However, what I did not expect was the fun
time I would experience researching this online. Moreover, I also learned so much more about
sailing on the various websites and even on the clip art pages, for example, that
identified all the parts of the sail.
Being a visual, hands-on learner, I found the wealth of resources online
to be conducive to my style of learning.
For example, I found the points of sail presented in numerous
formats: written out in detail to
graphically organized. I was hoping to
find a short, live sailing video discussing the points of sail to embed, but
was unable to do so. Consequently,
through this digital literacy project and the “new to me” resources, I found
myself eagerly delving deeper into my subject and learning much more outside
the scope of the project. Through this project,
I feel I am now fully capable of teaching the points of sail to others.
In my discipline, elementary reading and writing, the typical
images and visual genres utilized would first and foremost include books of all
varieties: novels, fiction, non-fiction, fairy tales, folk tales, science
fiction, recipe books, history, and more. Moreover, photographs, posters,
art work, movies, and digital media are utilized in the classrooms. In
the reverse manner, I enjoy having the students create their own images and
texts on blank sheets of paper to construct their own meaning.
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