Digital Stories are a cool way to showcase narratives, experiences and stories in an interactive way. To see examples of digital stories please see the following links:
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/learnshops/digital/movies/mylife.m4v
http://teach.fcps.net/trt18/Digital%20Writing/digitalstorysamples.htm
For this project we will be using two primary sources of technology- Powerpoint to display and time images and transitions and Audacity to record sound.
Part 1: Getting Familiar with the process.
We will be using fables to help us get familiar with the process of creating digital stories. The link below is where you will find the fable your group will use to get familiar with the process of making simple digital stories.
http://www.inspirationalwordsofwisdom.com/aesops-fables.html
The general steps to creating the digital story:
1. Storyboarding- is a technique used to organize your story. You will have screens to visualize each part of your story including the: image, the media and the narration.
I will give you copies of these storyboarding sheets in class. If you lose them or need more copies click the link below to print more.
http://www.jasonohler.com/pdfs/storyboard_template.pdf
2. After you have completed the storyboard for your project you will need to find images online to represent the different parts of your story. Google images is a good place to start looking, some other good websites for images include:
www.corbis.com
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/3_cool_sites_to_bookmark_your_favorite_images_on_the_web.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+(ReadWriteWeb)
Make sure that you save all of your images in your web folder once you have found them. It is a good idea to number your panels on your story board and label your images to correspond to the panels.
3. Once you have found and saved your images, you will need to start recording the sound for your story. You will be using a program called Audacity to do this. When reading your narration, be sure that each group member has a chance to read. Make sure you are speaking clearly into the microphone. Make sure that you are recording in a place that is relatively quiet, without a lot of background noise. Make sure that you are pausing during each narration to give yourself time to transition between slides and images. When you are done recording you will need to export your sound file as a .wav Then save it in your music folder. If you skip this step you will have trouble accessing your narration in Powerpoint.
If for any reason your computer doesn’t already have this program downloaded you can do that here:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
If you are absent the days we explore audacity in class you can find a tutorial here to help you:
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Category:Tutorial
4. Once you have completed recording your narration in Audacity and exporting the as a .wav file you will need to open Powerpoint and begin arranging your images on individual slides. The images should take up the entire slide. Make sure you are choosing good size images, so that when you format them, they don’t look stretched out. You will need to add transitions between slides, think about titles, etc.
5. Once all the images are on their own slide you will be adding your sound under the animation tab. Instead of choosing a preloaded sound, you will select other to access the sounds in your personal web folder. You will be adding your narration .wav file that you created in Audacity. The sound will play over the entire presentation.
6. Once your sound is uploaded, you will be timing the slides to transition automatically in sync with your narration. You will do this under the rehearse timing tab. Make sure that you are saving your changes often!
7. Once you have customized the timing of your slides, watch your presentation several times to make necessary changes to slides, timing, etc. You will probably need to do this at least 3 times through.
8. When you are satisfied with your final show upload a link of your show on your blog. Make sure that each group member has a link to your project on their individual blog.
These are the general steps to digital storytelling. We will be repeating this process 3 times using 3 different stories. So get the most out of this first go through, the level of difficulty will increase each time! 🙂
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