Reflections- Week 1

Digital Story Telling- I had never really thought about story telling in education. This was really shortsighted on my part because story telling is part of our tradition as humans. Maybe it is what sets us apart as humans. The minister of the church I attend often talks about the stories of our lives and how the bible is about stories. So the idea that everything we learn can be connected to a story was a very plausible idea to me but one that I just had never considered before. The idea of using technology to convey our stories is perfectly logical. First stories were transmitted orally, then by way of writing. Now we have the means to convey our stories digitally. Even if teachers aren't teaching storytelling via this method, students are definitely using all types of new mediums.



Ohlers discussion of the various components of DST was very useful. When I see teachers assign projects using technology, particularly PowerPoint, they often disregard the design aspects of the presentation, never discuss the actual presenting of the material (i.e. don't read from the screen), and totally disregard rules for good writing and for ethical use of information. This may NOT be the case in every school but it is most certainly the practice in my school. Because I am not an English teacher and have never considered myself a good writer I found the criteria for what makes a good story very helpful. I am wondering if Alicia was aware of these items. I don't remember learning anything like this in school? Is writing taught more systematically now so that students can grasp these concepts step-by-step?



I think this book is an excellent resource for using storytelling as a classroom tool and not just for DST but even in teaching material.



Non Designers Design Book- I had read this book several years ago (second edition) and found it so easy to appy all of the design techniques. I am very unartistic and yet this book helped me to have a much more critical "eye". I used the tips from the book to come up with the acronym CRAP which I use whenever I teach ppt. to high school classes. They remember the word and what it stands for Contrast; Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity. I am astonished by how few people have a grasp of these simple techniques. Most PowerPoints that I see are downright awful. For me the hardest concept is alignment; I am still working to get the placement of elements perfected so that the eye is drawn to the most important piece. Contrast was the easiest concept to grasp. I would think that this would be the easiest but still I see many presentations that have a light font on a white background or vice versa. This does get a little harder when you stray from the typical black font on white background. It is especially hard when the background has many colors (this might be a good reason for avoiding that situation). Repetition is also fairly straightforward. This seems to get many people; the conventional wisdom seems to be that the more elements you can load into a slide the better it is! Proximity, or the placing of elements that go together so that they are grouped together makes sense. I think our brain is "wired' to chunk information together if it connects. Again, there seems to be a sense that a presentation that fills all available whitespace is somehow better. I often wonder how many teachers are given training in this. Students can't be expected to know this and yet most teachers probably don't have a clue so we are producing a generation of presentation producers who have no clue as to what constitutes a good, better, or best visual presentation.