Digital Story Telling

Here is my first attempt at my digital story project.  I hope that this is OK because it isn't in a story format as far as having characters, setting, plot, etc.  We are studying polygons in math so I had the students apply what they are learning about the different number of sides and angles that polygons have.  I found an optical illusion calendar with the artwork of Rob Gonsalves and had my students choose a picture they liked.  They had to find a polygon and then explain how they knew it was a polygon.  This was also a great activity to promote speaking.  Some of them had a hard time speaking loud enough in the microphone, but most of them were relaxed enough and enjoyed it.

Story Kit app

Check out this post on one of the Manchester cohort's blogs.  It is about a free app called Story Kit (I think for the iPad).  Kids can draw pictures for a story, type words, and record themselves reading the story.  I think some of my reluctant writers would love it.  The teacher who posted it also uses it to create her own mentor text for writing.

More Digital Storytelling Tools

This site has a lot of digital story telling tools to try out!  I don't know which one to use for my project.

What to do, what to do????

I am narrowing down my ideas for my digital story project.  We are still working on identifying shapes in math so I think I am going to go with that since it is something that is relevant.  I found a calendar of optical illusions made up different polygons where the pictures play tricks on your eyes because things end and start where you don't expect them to.  Maybe I'll record the kids talking about the shapes they see in the picture and describe how they know the shapes by their attributes.  What do you think?

This is the cover of the calendar:

Digital Story Telling

I came across this video on YouTube about digital story telling.  It is another one of those tutorials "in plain English".  It helped to clarify what exactly digital story telling is all about.

Digital Story Telling

I wasn't clear about what digital story telling is all about and how I could use it in my classroom.  This post using VoiceThread has great examples for different age groups.  I like how digital story telling supports the speaking standards of the Common Core Standards.  The link below inspired me for my second-grade class.  We are starting our unit on shapes in math, and I was thinking that they could take pictures (maybe from calendars) and look for the different shapes in a similar I Spy format.


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