House RU Learning: October 2008

Students, it is time to get excited. We are going to be starting our Digital Stories. You might be asking yourself, "What is a Digital Story?" A Digital Story is just that, a story comprised of images, text, music and/or voice designed by you. Doesn't this sound fun? The fun part about this is that you get to be as creative as you would like. I have a couple of examples below this post that you can check out.

The first step in creating a digital story is deciding on a topic that interests you or a topic that you would like to learn more about. This is the easy part. The sky is the limit. Be creative. I would suggest creating a story on Thanksgiving or a story about the things you like to do for fun. This is where you get to decide what kind of story you want to share with the class.

After you decide on a topic it is time to start creating a storyboard. A storyboard is used to organize what you want to appear in your story. There are several different formats for storyboards. I will give you copies of the storyboards in class. On the storyboard you want to sketch ideas for the images and the text/voice that will tell your story. The images can be stick figures or simple sketches. Don't spend too much time on making your drawings look perfect. We will discuss in class more specifically what will be involved in creating your storyboard.

Next, you find images to use to tell your story. Download images from the web or use pictures you have taken. Make sure if you get images from the Internet that you give credit to the person or website that you borrowed the picture from.

When you have found your images decide on the voiceover and/or text.

We will be using the program Photo Story 3. This is a very simple program to use and I will walk you throught the program during class. You will be importing your images into the program. Here you will begin arranging the images in the order your story is being told.

After you arrange the images it is time to record on a microphone the story being told. This will probably take the most time. We will work through these steps in class so don't worry.

Finally, when you feel you have your story in order we convert it to a movie. Don't stress. This is going to be fun, and remember, I am with you every step of the way. :)

I am going to provide a list of links that you can surf to learn more about digital stories. Make sure you check out at least 2 of the 3 links I have available for you.