Changing the face of our classrooms!

This week I have learnt about more programs to create digital stories from several different pictures. I chose to work from the program photo story 3 which is a program that can be easily installed on the computers at school. I believe this program will be useful and meaningful for a number of different ways in my future classroom. For an example I could have students create their own digital story for themed topics in the curriculum. When I was student teaching in the fall, my cooperating teacher had let me in on a tip, when trying to plan activities and to hit the curriculum outcomes it is much easier to have "themes" behind every idea. With the advanced apps and programs today, we can collect or even take pictures at that moment and either caption it with text or even better have the students record their voices of what they would like to say about their picture or pictures. What I think would be an awesome way of using the recording system is having a picture or multiple pictures that relate to each other and show the class this with no sound or voice recording, then have your students work separately and record their own "story" of what they believe is happening in the story.  After the recordings are all finished I would have them send their videos to me and we would view them all as a class. I think this would be a very neat and engaging activity to introduce something new to the kids where it gets them thinking!!

Since iPads are a huge part of technology in the classroom with myself included using one I have listed some apps to download for digital storytelling:

Haiku Deck- is great for early years, quick access of storytelling. It can also can pictures right off the iPad and also searches images you are looking for and references the picture for you. 

Sonic pics- is an awesome storytelling application. You can put images in and record with the iPad to tell the story.  

Appsgonefree- is an app that shows you all the free downloads for the day. Is very useful and the apps can be deleted if you haven't used them or don't think you will once you check them out but can be accessed through your iTunes again for free even if they have s charge. 

Also here are some links to check out about digtial storytelling in the classrooms!!

http://www.microsoft.com/education/en-us/teachers/guides/Pages/digital_storytelling.aspx

http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/