Digital stories

In the spirit of including ICT and creating challenging and engaging assessments for my students I have created an excellent task for my year 8 Literacy class (if I do say so myself!) We have been studying the film Wall-e and I have gone throough with them the various film techniques and terminology and we have explored and broken down the meaning and messages of the film and how the film depicts these. So I wanted my students to take it the next step and have a deeper understanding of how films promote messages to the audience. So I set them the task of creating a Digital story. This allows students to impliment the concepts of filmic techniques and the creation of meaning in their films through narrative, character, music and action. The students were excited and engaged and came up with lots of creative ideas. By having students also create storyboards I was also able to scaffols students learning as they made their thinking visable.

DIGITAL STORYTELLING – BASIC STEPS

A digital story is a 2-3 minute multimedia movie that combines photographs, video, animation, sound, music, text and often narrative voice.

• How would you present the issue of the environment/global warming/pollution in a creative film to encourage people to help?

• Write a piece about this subject (at least a page)

• Read the page aloud to yourself or to each other.  Does it sound right?  Does it flow?  Too short?  Make appropriate adjustments.

• Create a Storyboard.  This helps to match the words of your story with the relevant images.  Break up your story into parts and think about what image would go best with what words.    

• (Optional) Record the story on the computer using AUDACITY – This can then imported to Movie Maker or PhotoStory.  Using AUDACITY produces a cleaner recording and is easier to edit if you fumble the lines.  Alternatively, you can record the story directly into Movie Make or PhotoStory3. 

• Put the story together using Windows MovieMaker or PhotoStory3.  In general, PhotoStory3 is an easier program to use, but you may feel more comfortable using Moviemaker.

• Import your photos and place them in the correct sequence, add transitions and titles.

• Import the Audio from audacity or record the story directly into the program.

• Save as a Media Player File.