Learning, Teaching & Technology

I chose to view this session as I have worked on a couple of digital storytelling projects with classes, with groups of 4th graders in particular. We have used still photographs, podcasts, voicethreads and iMovie to expand ways students can express their stories, but I hadn’t really considered a collaborative storytelling venture using web 2.0 tools.

Not having explored shared editing, I don’t recall hearing about the online tool jumpcut prior to this session. While they said they had some problems with the tool, this is a whole new area to explore for me. Since I figured that this might be an area under development, a quick search indeed turned up more tools that are collaborative online editors: JayCut, eyespot, photobucket, and even more. As always it will take some time to review various sites and determine what might be the best tool to use for a project at the elementary or high school setting. While finding the time is always a challenge I can possibly put some high school enthusiasts on the task and have them confront my real life problem and offer solutions.

One thing that was interesting in the video by Bonnie and the podcast by Kevin was to hear their own progression from teachers who gathered in a shared physical space to learn about digital storytelling to teachers who encouraged others to collaborate using only blogs, wikis and video clips without traveling from their home sites. In my own way I have to be patient with teachers who are expanding writing at the elementary level to include reactions to photos students have taken, podcasts, and electronic drawing tools to express themselves. The web 2.0 aspect of adding collaboration is still new to most of them, we may start with working between classes in our own school until that becomes comfortable. Perhaps this coming year when I am at the high school two days a week we will find some as yet untried ways to have high school students (whose forays into the communication world are constant) to work with classes and teachers to expand on the options for working in new ways.

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