Ed Tech Geek

Please visit the following link to listen to “The Collaborative ABC Project: Using Technology To Tell Stories” by Kevin Hodgson:

http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=182

Ever since I was introduced to the concept of digital story telling I loved it. I introduced this concept to my staff by reading them a story I wrote about my summer vacation and then showing them a Photostory in which the same story played, and they could see the pictures that second time around. It made a huge impression on my staff for the impact pictures can have on story telling. Take a look if you are interested: (double click on the video player when the page opens) My Summer Vacation . I had a few teachers use MS Photostory to create some really great class projects last year, but one problem always arose. I couldn’t figure out an easy way for all of the students to actively work on their part of the project at once. They could each do separate projects, or we could pull students one at a time to voice record their section of the class project, but if we were trying to create one collaborative class project they couldn’t all work on their section at once. When I heard Kevin’s idea about an online collaborative digital story telling project I was really excited.

I loved his idea for the ABC story, and the thought of so many people being able to submit their portion of this project was great. The actual presentation was wonderful, and I loved how they included the final product and many extras all on the same website. The deal breaker for me was when I went to jumpcut to see if this was a tool that could help me stich together pieces of student projects. I might be able to use this tool myself, but my initial reaction when I got to the jumpcut homepage was: WOW, I really hope this site is blocked at school. I haven’t checked to see if it is fact blocked yet, but the homepage shows there are a lot of people using jumpcut to make some extremely inappropriate videos.

I loved the idea of a web based tool where students could collaborate and piece together one final project as a group, so I am now looking into VoiceThread. I have just started to dabble earlier today, so I haven’t quite figured it all out, but I love what I see. I love the fact that a group can voice record together for one project, and just like a blog, they can receive responses on their creation. The only catch is that again, they would have to login. I really wish that the login didn’t require an email address, because one generic login would work to get the students in to this tool. I guess I could just set up a completely bogus email account separate from my own junk account and pick a random password. Does anyone have any thoughts on using a web based tool where you are using an email address as the user id?