Andrew A
Andrew A
Jul 10, 2017 · 5 min read

My INTE 5340 Reflection for Week 5

The topic this week was “Finding Voice.” This is one of the topics of this class that has resonated the most with me so far, as I believe helping students find their voices in their work is one of the most important roles of a teacher. And unfortunately, many of my past teachers didn’t really help me find my voice. I often felt like I was trying to figure the voice they wanted to hear, the one that would get me a good grade, and then I would channel that voice. It also was a lack of choice that also often limited my voice. As the article “Developing Voice in Digital Storytelling Through Creativity, Narrative and Multimodality” we read for class this week pointed out, children need diverse opportunities to be creative, and find their voice, before they are held accountable for technical skills like spelling or grammar. This point was made particularly clear on pg.149 where Vygotsky cites Blonskii (2004, 46), “Very often a child writes poorly because he has nothing he wants to write about.” The point here was if a child does not have something they are interested to write about, why would they care to learn how to write about it well? First they must develop a passion for ideas they want to communicate, and then they will want to learn ways to communicate them. And this is where Multimodality, a topic from an earlier week is so key, because once people find that passion for something they want to communicate, they should be able to express it in whatever forms of media they want. Now I think everyone should learn how to read and write, just as I think all United States citizens should learn about U.S. History, and World History for that matter. But the way we as teachers go about giving students choice and voice in what to write or read about, or what aspects of U.S. History they want to focus on, makes all the difference. OK, I’ll get off my soap box now and talk about what media I created this week in an attempt to find my own voice.

My critique this week was on an “adaptive” digital story called “Role of Music in Your Life.” I put the word adaptive in quotes because similar to my disappointment with the adaptive scenario called Mountain Rescue, which I critiqued previously here, there were not many choices for the reader to alter the direction of the story. Once again it felt like this digital story was going where the authors wanted it to, whether I liked it or not. This certainly didn’t help me find my voice. But I will agree with my classmate Alyson that the idea or principle behind this format of digital storytelling is exciting and has so much potential. I just want to see someone do it well! Alyson was much more forgiving in her critique below:

And my critique:

Rather than just continuing to complain I set off to find a better adaptive story platform/program/tool/etc. and I have been unsuccessful so far. But I did come across a webpage called “18 Free Digital Storytelling Tools For Teachers And Students.”

I was initially worried this webpage wouldn’t be of any use to me as it was published in 2013, but lo and behold, their recommendation of storybird.com was fantastic. One of the features of this website is you can use professional artists images to create your own children’s book. In fact, the website explains the main motivation for creating this website was to help children of all ages find their voice, and write their own stories. And although I felt very intimidated at first, I quickly felt myself relax by looking at the drawings, and letting a story form in my head. I can definitely see how having drawings to work with could really help children get their creative juices flowing. Sure I found myself wishing there were more images, so this website isn’t perfect, but I found enough images that went where I wanted my story to go that I came up with a decent first crack at a children’s book:

Once I got in a groove with writing the story I really enjoyed doing it.

Another piece of media I enjoyed creating this week was my daily create for DS106. The topic was take a picture of something common from a different perspective. I played around with this idea in my head for awhile, and then my fond memories of the movie Honey I Shrunk the Kids popped into my head, and I decided I want to do something related to that.

So, here is what I came up with:

I branched out from PowerPoint which I used to use to make something like this, and used https://pixlr.com/editor/ I found that pixlr was much more of an appropriate tool for this sort of media creation, and a power tool at that. I played with a lot of the different tools and did my best, but would like to get better at blending the edges of the images I cropped and cut and pasted on the other one. Both photos are my own.

The other program I played with for my first time this week was Mozilla’s X-Ray Goggles. I didn’t know this was possible, and I found it very entertaining and scary at the same time.

Although when you go to the link for my “hacked news page” there is the following information: “This is a Mozilla X-Ray Goggles remix of https://thimbleprojects.org/HTTP/andrewgappell/295422/,” I am still worried people could edit online news sources without other people knowing when they read it. This has tremendous potential for generating fake news. Now I REALLY think a media literacy class should be obligatory for all high school students to graduate. As far as using this program, I found it kept losing my changes which was really frustrating, but I found a way around it by publishing and saving my work every now and then, and then just using that saved copy to work from moving forward. It slowed down my process, but it felt good that I finally figured out a way to make it work. I even googled support for the problem I was having and didn’t find any info.

To finish up this reflection I would like to include some links to some of the work by my INTE5340 colleagues which I really like this week. I thought Shyna’s Pictogram Pictionary depicting the total solar eclipse coming on August 21st was clever:

I also really liked Jenna’s Sketch Note creation about herself and it inspired me to try to do something like this next week. I thought about trying it this week but got scared off, but now Jenna has made me feel like I can do it. Thank you Jenna.

Andrew A

Written by

Andrew A

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