Digital Storytelling: Making Lauren's Story

Digital Storytelling is fun, educational, inspirational, informational, and when done without a plan, HARD.

Charged with the task of creating a digital story, I decided to tell my own story – it is, in fact, the one I know best. I knew I wanted to use iMovie for all its versatility. I imagined a slideshow of sorts, since I don’t really enjoy being filmed :). I would gather pictures, create narration, and add an audio track.

First I had to decide the main idea of my story: How and I why I decided to become a teacher librarian. That was the easy part.

I’ve read enough about digital storytelling and done enough non-digital storytelling in my life to know that I needed an outline. I found an awesome open-source program called Celtx that allowed me to create storyboards to plan my project. Before I could break it down into boards, I needed a flow.

Where to start? This was a hard question to answer. I wanted my story to provide a good idea of who I am, without being too lengthy. I decided to go back to the beginning (little kid Lauren), but through the lens of storytelling. I also knew I wanted to insert a lot of knowledge I’ve gained about the field throughout my graduate courses.

With those decisions out of the way, I began planning my story. I used my outline to write the script in Celtx. I was able to break it down into “scenes,” and then within the scenes, simple “shots.”

As I began writing, the narration came to me. I split the lines into shots, and wrote descriptions of the images that I wanted to use or find to include in the story.

I then used the shot descriptions to find and gather all of the images into one place, a project folder in iPhoto. Meanwhile, I made sure to keep a word document with all of the image information so I wouldn’t have to spend too much time on citing sources later.

I ran into a problem, though. For several shots, I couldn’t find pictures that were both appropriate for the message I wanted to get across, AND personal enough to my story. So, I decided to try one of the web tools that has been touted by many an educator: Toondo.com. In ToonDo, I was able to create a cartoon character for myself. Then I inserted her into several different scenes that I created, changed her facial expressions and postures, and voila, I had several cartoon images to add to my story. While creating my cartoons, I kept thinking how much fun kids could have with this, and how easy it is to use.

The process of putting the iMovie together took a LONG time. I inserted the pictures in order (iMovie and iPhoto talk to each other, so my photos were already uploaded into iMovie) based on my storyboard. I then recorded the voice over, which was simple, but shotty. I don’t like my voice, so I had to learn to live with the output. Also, I don’t exactly live in a sound booth, and recording based on the Metro North Train schedule (every two minutes outside my window) was a little annoying.

I added transitions, worked on Ken Burns cropping (so it looks like the individual pictures are zooming), and then went on a search for music. A colleague told me about a great site called freeplaymusic.com that she uses when putting together company videos. You can browse for music by style (pop, folk, country…) or feel (happy, morose, bouncy…) and preview songs by different clip lengths. Best of all, you can download the songs for free! I found a fun song called “Moments Alone” that suits me perfectly. It’s a piano solo that sounds uplifting, but is not too spunky.

The clip wasn’t long enough for my story, so I used Garage Band (another Mac program) to chop it up and piece it back together to the length that I needed. I inserted it in my iMovie project, and iMovie automatically reduced the music volume to work with my voice narration.

I added my citations to scrolling credits, and decided to be done. Yes, I had to make the decision, because otherwise I could make tweaks forever and never be satisfied.

I shared the video with my Vimeo account right through iMovie, and voila!

Check it out:

Lauren's Story from Lauren Baideme on Vimeo.

The story of how I decided to become a library media specialist.

-LB

Going Back to Middle School!

Technology is awesome. It’s a major theme of my blog because of my course about integrating technology into the curriculum, and I’ve been able to preview and use so many great new web 2.0 tools for education.

However, my graduate courses have also been able to connect me back to something I used to love, and that is YA fiction.

When I began my course track in school library and media studies, I was immediately leaning toward elementary library. I love elementary students and the fact that they are still kids. I love showing young kids cool things for the first time, and helping them to figure out what this big world is all about.

But, after having observed in Middle School LMCs, I’m realizing that middle school students are still in that discovery period. Even better, they are starting to gain a sense of who they are and how they fit into this world. That’s a really exciting time. It’s a hard time, too, and there’s even more we as educators can do for them.

Because they are slightly older and have developed higher order thinking skills, middle school students are able to really start using some of the cool new web 2.0 creation tools in elaborate ways.

PLUS, bringing it back to YA fiction, there are some really great books out there to help them through adolescence.

This semester, I have had the opportunity to read such a great handful of books geared toward teens that span a wide range of themes, genres, and target audiences. For my final project, I wrote a bibliographic essay on YA dystopian novels and why (or why not) young adults should read them. Several of the books were geared toward high school students, but there are some great books out there for middle-aged kids, too.

Absorbing myself in the books that kids are reading just really brought me back home and reminded me that even without all the jazzy new tech tools, adolescence can be an exciting time for learning and discovery and thought-provoking discussions.

One of the great things about recent teen dystopias is that so many of them focus on the dangers of technology in terms of privacy and future problems, such as over population. Since technology is SO ingrained in kids’ lives today, literature can be a great way to have them think critically about the whole picture.

So, while I’ve made final decisions, I think my courses and observations have really changed my mind about the future that I see for myself as an LMS. I might be ready to do something that I NEVER thought I’d want to do…and that is go back to Middle School!

-LB