Week 6: Integrating Digital Stories to Build a Classroom Community

In each of the four senior level TE 402 sections (science, social studies, mathematics, and literacy), we have discussed that, even before beginning to focus on the target content, the development of a trusting, supportive, and collaborative classroom community is absolutely essential. While sifting through the various technologies located on Levine's blog, I came across "Slide", an amazingly easy technology that allows users to manipulate images within a "slide show"-esqe digital story. I explored both the "Slide" main page and Levine's sample projects, and viewed "Two Strangers", a story created by a "Slide" user-- I thought to myself, "What an awesome tools for students to use to put their unique personalities on display in the classroom". Through the use of these types of technologies (and the creation of digital stories such as the one embedded above), a truly connected and personalized community could begin to come to fruition; meaningful, unique images expose the identities of people more than words in isolation possibly could; by allowing students to both create and narrate (either digitally or in the classroom) their own "stories" as a beginning of the year project, substantial relationships between individual students could begin to form.

In retrospect, my experience utilizing Slide was positive--I loved the ease at which I was able to navigate through the site, as well as the easily identifiable and applicable "special effects" that were avaliable (cropping, shifting, and reordering the selected images, editing the time at which the images were displayed, lighting/coloring of images, etc.). Regardless of the age of one's students, with appropriate scaffolding from the instructor, this specific site would be an exemplary tool for students to put to use (either inside or outside of the classroom) when creating personalized digital stories. However, I was unable to implement audio into my story, which, depending on the goals, objectives, or intentions of one's lesson, could be considered a tremendous downfall--in my opinion, personally mixed audio assists in bringing these types of stories to life, and serves as additional motivation in completing the assignment (for an exemplary "digital story" site, check out Photo Story 3--this tool is easy to both download and install, and has very unique audio features that I introduced to third grade students; they loved it!). However, when taking this technology's overall potential into consideration, I believe that Slide would be an extremely effective tool to implement into one's classroom. The utilization of the technology (i.e., instructing the students in regards to how Slide can/should be used) would not take away from/damper the designed lesson goals and/or "big ideas", which, I believe, is something that all instructors must deeply consider when attempting to integrate the use of technology into their instruction.