Moving at the Speed of Creativity

As the first student-created “Great Book Stories” shared with VoiceThread on the collaborative book-sharing project I started today, my two oldest kids shared some perceptions about why “Who Was Helen Keller” by Gare Thompson and the books “Eragon” and “Eldest” by Christopher Paolini are some of their favorites. These were each created and recorded from start to finish in 15 minutes each, just before bed tonight! I helped them find the pictures and typed the title on each one to save time, they imported the images and recorded their voices. Alexander actually “drove the mouse” doing all his recording, Sarah had me do to mouse work for hers. Sarah re-recorded at least 3 of her voice narrations several times, Alexander just re-recorded one of his.

I consider these more “proof of concept” digital stories rather than exemplary “best practice” digital stories. When I help teachers learn about digital storytelling, I emphasize the writing process and a four step process:

1. Plan
2. Produce
3. Chop
4. Publish

We did minimal planning for these digital stories, so in the weeks to come I’ll likely work with both Sarah and Alexander to have them actually write scripts to go with their storyboard for these “Great Book Stories.” Despite these acknowledged limitations, I think they both did a good job and shared some worthwhile perceptions about these books. They certainly demonstrated this can be done quickly!
Here they are!

Alexander’s is particularly poignant because, as I wrote last spring, the book “Eragon” was his “home run book” that first hooked him into reading. On the fifth and final image of his VoiceThread about the books, he shares (in his own words) this fact that Eragon was his home run book. This was an unsolicited comment and observation from me. As a young fourth grader, Alexander now defines himself as a reader. This is a HUGE change from the start of third grade when he did not like reading by himself! This summer he started reading the Harry Potter books, and just finished reading book four over the weekend. He’s now over 100 pages into book five. All hail the POWER OF READING!!!!
One big “lesson learned” from our quick VoiceThread digital stories tonight was to click the SWITCH button when you are changing the actual author of a digital story. I neglected to do this, so as a result the author for Sarah’s digital story shows up as me, and the author of Alexander’s shows up as Sarah. This could have been avoided if I’d clicked the SWITCH button before making their separate VoiceThread stories. Instead of doing that, we just clicked the avatar/user icon at the bottom of the VoiceThread to change the icon of the person recording, not the actual identity of the person logged in:

Tomorrow evening I’ll share these as examples with teachers in MidDel Schools in Midwest City, Oklahoma, just east of Oklahoma City as we start a five-part workshop series on digital storytelling. More VoiceThreads are coming about favorite books!

Technorati Tags:
eragon, books, eldest, helenkeller, reading,voicethread, digitalstorytelling

On this day..

• New announcements from Apple - 2007
• Instructionally Investing in VoiceThread - 2007
• Required digital signatures bad for open source? - 2006

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 9:30 pm and is filed under books, digitalstorytelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.