Digital Story Telling:

From Wikipedia; “Digital Storytelling” is an emerging term, one that arises from a grassroots movement that uses new digital tools to help ordinary people tell their own ‘true stories’ in a compelling and emotionally engaging form. These stories usually take the form of a relatively short story (less than 8 minutes) and can involve interactivity.

Digital Story Telling has become very popular among innovative and exciting educators, both in the general and special education settings in the last 2-3 years.  It is something that has me really excited!

On my recent trip to Australia with my family, I created a blog for our friends and family back home to keep up with our adventures down under.  I found fascinating the idea of telling a story, conveying a message and sharing an adventure through mixed digital media.   People of many different ages, cultures and geographic locations were quite engaged in the process.  So, the Digital Story Telling concept is a little different than just blogging, but the general idea is the same.  I think it really has potential to ignite struggling students as both writers and readers!

I have workshops scheduled for this school year already that will target Digital Story Telling and in preparation for that I thought I’d post a few options for educators to start looking at.

Slide: Slide is just one of the MANY, MANY free online options available for creating a Digital Story with your students.  http://www.slide.com

Joggle: Joggle is another one of my early favorites.  This one allows you to upload images OR use your flickr or google images by image-tag, which is really cool!  One really nice feature is that you can use voice-over AND text along with your images to tell your story.  I really like this ability.

Slideflikr: You can use this one to create slideshows from your flikr account photos and then embed the slideshows easily in other places, like your own website, the schools website, student blogs, classroom blogs, etc!  AND… you can use your flikr account login/password, so there’s no need to set up a new account.  This is certainly a favorite as it makes embedding a slideshow by tag, user or description VERY easy.  However, it doesn’t allow for text, audio or voice-over.   http://slideflickr.com/

…more on Digital Story Telling next week

Taste Kid: This is something I came across when thinking about what I consider to be the most difficult of the 3 main Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Principles, Multiple/Flexible Means Of Engagement.  Our students come to class from such a diverse background with such diverse interests that when we find something that truly engages them we should make every effort to ride that wave for as long as possible.  So, this website is a search engine of sorts where you can type in the name of a movie, music, or book that your student likes and Taste Kid will suggest other movies, music and books that are along the same lines with previews of each!  How great for teachers who may not be familiar enough with the books or movies a student is currently engaged in to suggest further reading, etc!   I’ve tried it with a few of my favorite movies and have learned about several more movies that I never even knew existed!  Give it a shot.

~REMINDERS~

PATINS Regional Site Trainings: Don’t forget that you can always see the workshops and trainings that are scheduled at each of the PATINS Regional Sites here: http://www.patinsproject.com/regional.html. Many workshops have already been scheduled and posted!

PATINS State Conference! …and don’t forget to register for the 2008 PATINS State Conference here: http://www.patinsproject.com/training.html Deadline is October 17, 2008

The Conference Booklet (including registration form) can be downloaded here:
http://www.patinsproject.com/Conference/ConferenceBooklet.pdf

Register for the Free PATINS Assistive Tech Online Overview Course here:
http://www.patinsproject.com/overview.htm Deadline is September 12, 2008

More info on the AT Overview Course here:
http://www.patinsproject.com/onlinefaq.pdf

NEW UDL Pilot Site APPLICATIONS being accepted!  Info here:
http://www.patinsproject.com/udl.html Deadline is October 6, 2008