March 20- Digital Story Progress

For fields, I am teaching a math unit on customary units of measurements. I was trying to think of different ways I could use my digital story to help the students with learning, and I decided to use it as a sort of review. For one of my lessons, I was asked to do a short unit review that would help get the students ready for the unit test. I thought this digital story would be a fun thing to incorporate into my lesson.
My digital story is showing that we really do use math. It isn't just one time in class while learning it, but we see the math everyday in everything that we do. I wanted to make this real. So rather than going to the internet for pictures, I chose to take the majority of the pictures by myself. There are a few that I got online, but for the most part my pictures are of things that I see everyday that can be tied into customary units of measurement. Even for me, it helped me realize how often I truly rely on knowing customary units in my daily life.
I was able to find sound clips from Soundzabound that work well with each measurement. The sound clips are very different styles from one another, but they are all fun. Each measurement type has a different song just like it has different units involved. But they are all fun, just like each type of measurement can be seen in similar items.

March 10-Digital Story #2

I never knew that by using songs that we have purchased for presentations and different things was considered copy-right. I learned a lot about the copy-right laws in class yesterday. It amazes me how many things go into it and how many things are affected by it. One thing that really surprised me that we learned about was that by showing a movie in class actually is going against copy-right.
During the lesson, I was thinking about all of the different resources that I have used for different class projects. I didn't realize that all of that time I had been going against individual's licenses and copy-right. This new knowledge will allow me to hopefully be able to get used to working with copy-right laws before I get out into an actual teaching job. I have always known that copy-right is a lot more than plagarism, but that is usually all I think of when copy-right is brought up. I will now think of all of the other tools/resources that are protected under this law.
With knowing how to create licenses for my own personal use and why I would want to, I think it is important to create one for projects that I may complete. I now know that I need to contact and get permission for a lot of the resources and tools that will be helpful in my future classroom. It will be good to know that in the future if I want to use a purchased media file (movie or music) in my classroom, I still need permission from the company. I think that it is important to allow others to edit and revamp my projects. I think that better ideas are created and brought to life when more people are involved so I would be grateful for new insights on personal projects.

March 2- Digital Story #1

I never really understood what a digital story was. It is interesting to see how they are used. I learned a lot more about different subjects and events by simply watching the few digital stories that we viewed in class. It is neat to me to see how displaying information in the digital story allows for a lot of different types of media to portray the event or subject matter in personal, different, and unique ways.
Using the digital story as a way of introduction to a particular subject would be very useful. Many of the ones we watched were very powerful and left you wanting to know more or see more. Utilizing this tool would be a great benefit in classroom settings. It will help to get the students more excited about learning. It also allows for a few minutes to recall previously learned knowledge or connections that individuals might have with specific subjects.
I still am unsure on how the whole process of making one is. But depending on how difficult it is, it could be a good way to have students present their knowledge. It would be a good representation of understanding and connections that might have been made from the learning experience. It could be utilized for every subject for ways of introduction, assessing, reporting, or just a fun assignment for students to be involved with.