Week 5 Reflection

Things were moving along smoothly last week on our digital story. By this Tuesday’s class we had written our storyboard, collected all the photos, recorded our narrative, and inserted all of our photos into the Movie Maker program. A small glitch was eventually overcome in getting the narrative into the proper type of file; then we thought we were ready for smooth sailing. Wrong. After two hours of class, our only accomplishment was that we had successfully got the narrative to import into the program. Disequilibrium is the state I found myself in for the next several hours. Eventually, I found my way back to equilibrium and all is well now.

Learning a new program without guidance brought both frustration as well as a sense of accomplishment in the end. From our experiences working with movie maker, it seems as though to be successful all the production work must be completed and a finished movie produced on the same computer or else all is lost. Even after hours of struggles, I now feel successful because in the end I could complete the assigned task. Now, I have a working relationship with the movie maker program and feel as though I can use the program successfully to create and present information to my eventual students. However, I am not so sure that I would use it as a project I would have my kindergarteners use until I was much more successful and understood the limitations I had to work with so that I could guide them through to success.

I feel that a problem with the digital story project is that the final production of putting all the information together rests on one person. Although each member of the pod gathered and participated in the first stages of the project, only one person could work on the project to put it all together. I feel that there should be a more collaborative way for many people to work on the digital story all at once. This could work similar to a Google document. There probably is a program that allows for this type of collaboration that professionals use daily.

The overall message from the video Did You Know? is having us ponder the type of education we are providing to students and if that type of education is going to be useful for the students as they enter the world of tomorrow. Shift happens. Change happens. Are we changing to meet that change or are we resisting and sticking with what we already know? The video challenges educators to step up and make the education we provide useful and relevant for our students. We have to use technology to engage our students.

In the video A Vision of Students Today, two hundred students collaborated on a document to create the message that educators need to change the educational environment. There needs to be change if the education that is provided is going to useful and relevant in their lives. I looked up the word digital ethnography on the web and it stated that said “application of new technologies to the process of ethnography. Ethnography is the branch of anthropology that deals with scientific description of specific human cultures. The students we teach tomorrow are part of a digital culture. We as educators need to seize the opportunity to include technology into the classroom if we plan on helping them achieve their goals for the future.