Week 4 Reflection

This week in class we began learning about digital storytelling. At first, I thought digital story telling would be a book created with digital pictures that includes narration that is online. Now I understand digital storytelling is telling a story which includes photos, video, narration, and music. The three digital stories we viewed in class invoked deep feelings. The story tellers had emotional life stories to tell. All digital stories do not need to be emotional. The digital story that our pod is creating is light and informative as we are focusing our efforts towards kindergarten.

Our pod is working together very nicely. During class, we looked at the kindergarten core, found a standard and objective we wanted to cover, wrote our script and found the pictures we wanted for the digital story. All the members of the pod were working together on different areas of the presentation and things are moving along very smoothly. I hope when I am at a school, I will have a good working relationship with the other kindergarten teachers and faculty in order to make things work.

Digital storytelling would be a tool that I could use with my colleagues to create stories to present to meet our standards and objectives using technology. My kindergarteners could create an online story that we could use to show parents what we are learning in the kindergarten. As the students of today are accustomed to using technology, I believe with some guidance, they would be successful. This project would require commitment but I think the end results would be positive. Digital stories help provide information and can evoke deep feelings. Creating digital stories can be time consuming to create but can be used to teach students who are accustomed to using technology.

The NASA digital story was both informative as well as thought provoking. I have often wondered why our country spends so much to go back to the moon and into space when astronauts were loosing their lives. From the digital story I learned that the technology gained from NASA goes to benefit the medical field, transportation, engineering, energy consumption, weather forecasting, safety and much more. For every one dollar spent on research and development it is estimated the country receives tax revenues of seven dollars in jobs and economic growth. Something that I did not know was the large number of lives lost in space travel. All the individuals were named with the tragedy that took their lives. This made me realize they are real people who made great contributions to the life I live today.