Digital Storytelling

This week in class we learned about digital storytelling. We learned how to use two sites to create your story, Voice Thread and Animoto. Both sites were super easy to use, however on Voice Thread you can add a voice over narrative to your pictures and on Animoto you cannot. A cool thing though about Animoto is that you can upload music to your digital story. You can use music you have downloaded on your computer or music that they have already uploaded onto the site. You can add text to your pictures on both sites so along with having the pictures in a slide show type thing you can also have text telling a story. I think these are very cool websites and it is really fun adding all of your pictures so they create a slide show type thing. Once you've created your sideshow or story you can post it to whatever website you want. However, Animoto only lets you have 30 seconds of pictures for free, so if you want to add more photos you will have to pay. If I were to use this technology in a classroom it would probably be so I could upload pictures of our class onto a class website so the parents could see what we are doing in the classroom instead of just reading about it. Pictures are fun to look at, especially if they are of your children so I think the parents would really like something like a digital story. If my classroom had access to a computer for every child it might also be nice to teach them how to make their own digital story for a project on a specific unit that we are learning about.