2011-J-Beth

=Journal=

Instructions
6/21/11 I felt like I made a significant break through today while we were working on our project proposal. At first Hope was just having to tell me what to put into the Unit Description because I am not familiar with the curriculum content being a classified employee. Celia came over to talk with us and I was able to ask her if I could go with the part of the project I feel more comfortable with (the skills) and she helped me push that idea further into a content idea. Celia helped me see what an essential question would look like. I was thankful to be given the freedom to take what I wanted to bring to the project and flesh it out. Where as before I was sitting there asking Hope what to do, I immediately had many ideas of my own to expatiate.
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The breakthrough was in being able to formulate essential ideas. This takes the skills into content. Once I was able to get the gist of formulating an essential idea, my original unit plan began last Friday, which was about how to use the equipment properly and effectively to create a digital story, turned into : How can you create a digital story that **//__effectively communicates__//** your essential ideas. The skills are there put now there is a goal and purpose for the skills. I think that not knowing how to move from the skills to a bigger picture has been haunting me these last few years. I knew that we needed to be doing more than just teaching skills, but every time I tried to push beyond that in my mind, I felt confused and in the dark. It felt like a brick wall that I was hitting over and over again. Now there is a chink in that wall and light is peeking through. I was able to look at the four digital projects that Hope and I are going to do and not see them as teaching skills but to see the skills as supporting a greater purpose. I was able to formulate an essential overarching question for each of the project that gave them excitement and focus. Celia and Eric let me process with them what I was thinking and affirmed that I was heading in the right direction and gave valuable input and questions to help me hone my proposal. Hope and I met and talked about the four project's purpose as related to an overall purpose and we both felt like we were pushing the projects to a higher level. =Entries= 6/18/11 Yesterday, Friday, our assignment was to make an instructional video showing how to make a paper airplane. I was not excited about this one and was hoping that we would not have time to do it and get to skip it :) But alas, we had plenty of time. As we started out to plan the movie, I told Hope that it is good for us to have to do things we don't initially want to do, as students are often given projects they don't care for. I think that part of my focus during this workshop is to try and think like a student; perhaps that is why I tend to want to keep our projects as simple as possible. Once we got going with the project, we were engrossed and enjoying ourselves. I got over that inceptive hump of unwillingness to engage in the project.

We did not have a hard time coming up with a simple storyboard and we were able to get all of the filming done and imported into iMovie before the morning was over. There was a little extra time to work on editing. And here is where something one clip took LOTS of time. We wanted to grab a portion of the video and show a small segment of a close up of me thinking. That was easy to add because we filmed that shot. Once I started putting the footage together, I noticed that there was also a tiny segment where Hope was thinking and I wanted to isolate it and bring it in as a close up like the one of myself. There were several challenges. I was in the picture too; this was fixed by cropping the shortened clip to show Hope only. There was my big loud mouth talking when this shot needed to be silent for the thinking process; this was fixed by turning the volume off for that segment. There was the fact that the clip would not let me lenghtened it. Believe me I tried everything but I could not get it to last for at least a second. It looked funny because the clip of me thinking lasted about 1.5 seconds and the one of Hope just flashed in and out. After spending over an hour working with this one clip, I finally slowed the clipped down by using the speed bar in the Inspector. I wish that we would have filmed a shot of Hope thinking from the beginning, but since it was an afterthought, I am glad that the software provided a way to manipulate the film to get close to what I was looking for. Another problem with our raw footage is that we did not give enough lead in time on some of the shots and the movie has to jump right into the action/dialogue.

Lesson learned: take lots and lots and lots of footage!

6/16/11 Our first digital storytelling project was a short movie promoting an ideal school. Hope was my partner. We did not bring any ideas to the table when we first started. The first thing we did was to identify who our target audience would be. Once we decided that our aim was to attract teachers to our school, the ideas flowed. We kept our film on the simple side. We picked out four aspects of teaching to draw potential teachers to our fictional school. The approach for each of the aspects was the negative side of something transformed to a positive by choosing to teach at our school. This gave a consistency to our film and to our scenes. We transitioned from the negative to the positive by placing a still image between as a bridge. We used tag lines to unite the film: "What is your biggest challenge in teaching?"; "If you taught at Butler......."; "I want to teach at Butler!".