Final Digital Story and Blog #8

Creating my final digital story project has been a lot of work! Making the storyboard and all of the other related parts last week took me forever, but I thought that making the final video would be a little bit easier. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. A few people had already posted their final videos and watching them just ended up confusing me even more about what was expected and what we were supposed to be making. Although many of us have corresponded quite a bit through facebook trying to make sure we were clear on the expectations, watching the posted videos just made me question if I was even doing the right thing. Because it was really too late to check with others, I decided to just do what I thought was right, and hope for the best. But really, it reinforced the fact that explaining the directions and expectations beforehand was so important. When I do end up using DST with my own students, I know that I will have to be explicitly clear with that fact.

Regarding the actual putting together piece of my video, I found that trying to make a story out of my culminating experience proposal was not easy at all. I think I mentioned this last week, but it seems like the proposal would work for an informational kind of video, but not necessarily one where we are trying to utilize digital storytelling strategies from Ohler’s book. Trying to make my proposal into a story took a lot of effort and rethinking. Although my final story makes sense to me, I’m not entirely sure if it will make sense to others. But I do know that I did my best, and that’s really all we can ask of ourselves at this point.

As for the actual pieces of the video, getting the video clips to work with the still images, music files, and narration pieces took a lot of work. I wasn’t really sure how to add music and keep the audio levels constant. I’m not sure if it is possible with windows live movie maker, but I wanted to be able to increase the sound at certain points, and then decrease it at others. But I couldn’t find a way to make that work, so I had to just make do with keeping the music quiet. I did get a lot better with my transitions and effects, and felt they were easier to get right, now that I have used this version of movie maker for awhile now.

If I had had more time, I think I would have really double and triple checked the requirements and expectations for this video. With the examples provided and the change of instructions from one week to the next, I never really felt like I understood what was needed. Because of that, my video ideas were really wishy-washy. I would have liked to get some more and better clips of students in my class, but at this time of the school year, that is really difficult...so I just had to make do with what I could get. Also, the music was really difficult for me to figure out. I am not good at just finding the right song, and I spent way too long just coming up with something to even use in my video. Then...I forgot to add the songs to my final credits, and actually had to go back and re-save it with the songs added. 


Other than that though, I feel like this was a great learning process, and that I really did learn a lot throughout the course of this class. I wish that I could start working with some of my students on some DST projects right away, but will probably have to wait until next school year. After all the work I’ve done this semester, I am very excited to see what my students will be able to do!