(Learning Entries Blog #2 starts here!) Week Seven: Digital Storytelling

The thought of bringing digital storytelling into the elementary classroom unleashes so many ideas in my mind. Using different programs, such as Windows Movie Maker, iMovie, Animoto, or GoAnimate, students can depict just about anything: plotlines to stories read in class, the year in review, hopes and dreams, among plenty of others. Digital storytelling becomes an innovative outlet for people of any age.

Using images and audio to portray and evoke emotion through a video is an incredible action: the ability to persuade, ability to remind, or ability to invoke are talents to be honed in various fields. Below is a video of a family trip, white water rafting in Idaho. It recaptures many pleasant moments in the lives of my family members and myself.

Using Windows Movie Maker, a program that came included on my computer, I arranged the photos to Regina Spektor's "The Call." (In case you were wondering: when we all got together to watch the video after the trip, my mother and older brother cried. Molly = WIN!)

Other digital storytelling programs include, but are not limited to:

• Picasa is a great tool for uploading and editing photos online. You can crop and remove red-eye, along with a plethora of other options. Picasa allows for finishing a photo and then placing it in a presentation.

• Kerpoof is a program I would seriously considering using in an elementary classroom. It looks like fun and I am 100% sure that children would love it: doodling, making a cartoon movie, making a story in an online storybook, and coloring pictures. This program not only encourages students to use their imaginations and learn, it allows room for infinite fun.

• Glogster is a website on which you can create your own posters and wallpapers for your computer or blog. Love a certain picture or quote, or both? Make a poster that includes one or both of them!

• xtranormal is a site that offers text-to-movie videos. Users can design characters and write scripts, and when completed, a video of characters with automated voices will act out any scene created.

Digital storytelling is used often in certain areas of life: presentations, picture slideshows, music videos. In the future, with all sorts of technological advances, who knows what's in store?