AR 6
My example
I found this week’s activity to be very similar to the one we did a few weeks ago, where we used a Prezi to make a presentation. And to be honest, that was what I thought I would use for this example… then I ran into a problem. The Prezi still would not play sound, and it did not like half the pictures I wanted to use for some reason (formatting issues). Plus, I was still having a very hard time having it only zoom on what I wanted to. It turns out that when you have pictures and text at the same time it tends to want to focus on only part of the picture, no matter how small I made the picture or grouped the information.
I got frustrated and started to do the digital storytelling example on PowerPoint, thinking that a different (easier) perspective on the project might help me organize my ideas a bit better. I wanted the darn thing to be of a reasonable length, and I could have done that easily, but I realized it’s an example, so I limited it to a small number of slides. They have lots of visual references so that my English speaking students wouldn’t be completely lost with all the Spanish text. This would also show the students a good way of making the presentation eye catching; so that I didn’t have all pictures or all text when the time came to evaluate the project.
After I was done with the PowerPoint, I still wanted to use a digital share site, so I took the advice that Kelvin had given us a few weeks ago and I played around with a few other sites that were given to us as an option to originally create our digital storytelling presentation. I ended up using Empress. Empress is a free program to use like Prezi, and it has a lot of cool features (including easy to add sound), and it uploads existing PowerPoint presentations without much hassle (my last slide wouldn’t upload due to the size of the JPG – so the class doesn’t get to see my son). But most importantly, Empress makes it easy to share my presentation with my blog and with my wiki!
And so without further delay, here is my Empress example that is also available on my Wiki page.
PS: In case you are interested, the son is "Dejame Entrar" (Let me in) by Carlos Vives. He's a Colombian artist that was born and raised near where I was... plus, I just love that song!
What a wonderful way to have the students introduce themselves to the class. I think it is a great way to break the ice. Your project is a refreshing change on an old idea. You could also use the same idea to have the students tell “what they did over the summer vacation.”
ReplyDeleteI liked the program that you used, Empress. I have never heard of it before. I’m going to try it out in the future. I enjoyed the music that you added to your digital story. I also had difficulty trying to put music into a prezi presentation.
One minor note. I couldn’t find what grade level you developed this presentation for. It would be interesting to see if this was made for elementary, middle or high school.
Overall, I enjoyed you project (even though I can’t read Spanish). Thank you for the last page that you put in English!
I am glad you liked it, and I'm glad you could see the multiple applications for it... it's how I intended it. :)
ReplyDeleteI guess I have to go over my page a bit more (and the lesson plan will make this clearer), the project is for High school. Even though it could translate well for middle school. I don't think it would work well for lower elementary, but maybe the upper years if they had Spanish instruction available to them. (Not an option in my county, the first year you have a language available is 8th grade.)
Thank you for the great review, and for pointing out that I left the grade level out. And I'm glad you enjoyed the music too, I love that particular artist. As for the program (Empress), I like it... I'm having an issue with it right now, but I'm liking it so far.
Alex