Making the Video

The first thought I had when I read the assignment was that I had nothing to write about. I was panicking already! After reading the articles that were assigned this week, the one that I found the most beneficial was “Digital Storytelling Cookbook” by Joe Lambert. Then I decided to go to visit www.storycenter.org, and I then became panicked again. These videos were so professional, so profound, so deep. I thought back on my life, and could not think of anything that was as amazing as the videos that I had just watched. I am not married, have no kids, grew up in a small town in Texas, nothing that exciting has happened to me. But I continued to think about it, on Tuesday night I woke up several times thinking about my video-what was I going to do? I kept going back to a story about how I obtained my cat, and I decided that I would do a story about him and how he changed me. It wasn’t that exciting, and I was concerned people would think that I was strange creating a video over a cat! I started to write, and the words came out, I was surprised how much time I spend writing, editing, writing and editing. After receiving some comments over my piece, I edited some more! I had a problem with some pictures, there were some I would like to have used that were on my but my camera is broken, and being the first week of school, hadn’t had time to get it fixed. Luckily I have a few albums on Snapfish, and that is where I got many of my pictures. Overall, the experience has been beneficial-although as a teacher I assign my students projects such as this, I have never done one myself. I can see now the effect and usefulness this can have on students. Since I knew that I was having to share this with my classmates (and the world!) I spent more time on it and made sure it was up to my standards. I spent many more hours on the project than I expected! I can see how if you had your students do this in the classroom-they would want to be experts on the topic and would want to create a video that was up to their standards.