Digital Story Telling Technology

I decided to use the digital story technology to tell a story about my favorite vacation. My favorite vacation is when I went to Mykonos, Greece the summer before my senior year of college. It was my favorite vacation because I went with my boyfriend and the scenery was so incredibly beautiful. Some activities that we did in Greece was sight seeing, shopping, going to the beach, and hiking. I also loved this vacation because the food was delicious. The favorite food that I ate was a Greek salad, which was much different from any Greek salad I have had in the United States. This salad had many cubed vegetables like tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, olives, and feta cheese. I thought it was so interesting that there was no lettuce in this salad unlike salads in the United States. I thought that digital storytelling would be useful for my teaching because it can be used in so many different subjects. In this particular digital story the teacher could use it to teach about different cultures or to have the students present a favorite memory to the class. I think it would be useful for students to do storytelling in this way because they tell stories through pictures and few words. This technology would be beneficial for students who struggle with reading and writing because there does not need to be a lot of texts in the digital story. It does help the students with story telling because they have to find pictures and put them in a logical sequence. To make my digital story I used www.onetruemedia.com. I thought this technology was very easy to use and it was free. All I had to do was upload the pictures from my computer or I could have uploaded them from the Internet. Then I put the pictures in the order I wanted them to appear and determined how long I wanted each picture to show up for. After this I could apply transitions, text, and music. The last step was to preview the digital story and share the link on my blog. The only negative aspect to this website was that in order to have the text appear you had to be premium member, which cost $3.99 a month. I was a little frustrated because I found this out after I had created the digital story, so I paid the $3.99. I really like this technology and plan on trying to use it in the classroom during my internship year.