Digital storytelling and Using Images Reflection

Digital storytelling uses videos, pictures, and creative to tell a story in a new and interesting way. A science teacher can use digital storytelling to hook students on a topic, teach a lesson, or review a lesson. The approach used by Common Craft with the "in Plain English" series is one example of digital storytelling that a teacher could follow and create a lesson. Watching the elementary students do their projects using the " in Plain English" method, shows how science topics can be presented in easy to understand format and in a way that everyone can produce a video. I like the idea of a short and to the point video that is based on context and not fancy editing or sophisticated equipment. This is something that most teachers can do and that students can do with very little guidance.

It was informative to read the copyright and fair use information. Multimedia presentations using original and copyrighted material can be used for student instruction for up to two years. The sources should be credited in the project including author, title, publisher and date. A notice can be added to the project stating that "materials included under fair use exemption of US copyright law and prepared according to multimedia fair use guidelines and restricted from further use." http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr280.shtml

The Creative Commons site produces free licenses of your work that allows other to use, modify, or build on your creations. The site allows you to search for images that the creator is allowing others to use. You then can use these images in your multimedia project. It was an easy site to use and many images were available for the searches I tried. Here is a picture I found when searching cell organelles. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cell_parts.png

Chapter 2 on Digital Images and Video for Teaching Science from the textbook explains the benefit of using relevant images and videos to enhance a lesson. The images need to fit the content and instructional goals. The teacher should have a discussion with the class about the image and ask meaningful questions. The image or video should add to the teaching and not replace the teaching done by the teacher. The teacher should be careful of copyrighted images and video and show students how to use web content correctly.

I think images and videos are extremely useful to show experiments or events that are just not possible to do in a classroom.

This site was listed in the text and it shows microscope and photomicrograph pictures of many different things. http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/micro/gallery.html I searched the butterfly wing scale gallery and compared a blue morpho butterfly to a monarch butterfly.

I can see many uses for this site including using the DNA pictures, picture of cholesterol, process of mitosis, and nucleotide pictures. I would add them to my prepared lectures and presentations to enhance the lesson.

The textbook chapter also illustrated how data can be collected from a video of an experiment. I think this is a create interactive way to use a video.

I wanted to include a video that I had taken and include it in this post. I used my Nikon CoolPix camera to take this short video yesterday of my daughter. My husband created a water slide/slip and slide for my daughters.

I can see my students using digital cameras to take pictures of parts of an experiment as before and after pictures or a short video of part of the experiment.

Using pictures and videos in a lesson or project is an easy way to enhance student learning. Proper use of copyrighted images is important and needs to be taught to the students.