Week 2

Digital Storytelling- The reading for this week was very relevant. Our district, as are most school districts in NJ are really emphasizing core curriculum content standards. This chapter discusses all of the ways that DST addressses many different content standards and literacies. A friend of mine, who is a curriculum coordinator for a K-8 school district, told me that at a workshop that the NJ Dept. of Ed sponsored, DST was specifically mentioned as a tool for connecting technology with many different literacies to make sure that students are prepared for the 21st Century.

This chapter addressed two special initiatives that my district is focusing on this year: Backward design and different types of literacy. I liked the acronym of the DAOW of literacy. I was able to have a discussion with our curriculum director about DST and he is very interested in pursuing it as a vehicle to incorporate more technology into a language arts curriculum. No one in our district has done anything with digital storytelling so the curriculum director is very interested in me doing a workshop on DST. I told him that he needed to wait to see how well I did in the class. His response was that I would know more than anyone else.

Non-Designers- The remaining part of the book discussed more design techniques. Particularly the use of color and fonts. The color information was something that I had learned in art (one of the few things that I did learn!) so it wasn't new information for me. Also, many sites now give color palettes that give suggestions for color choices. But the information on fonts was very useful and informative to me. When I first read the book I had a hard time distinguishing between serif and nonserif. I can definitely see the difference. I am not sure if I read it in this book or somewhere else, that serif fonts are much better for print materials whereas nonserif is much better for visual presentations such as PowerPoint. It used to drive me crazy that the default font in PowerPoint was times new roman. I always told students to choose Verdana if they didn't know which one to choose. In another book I read that Verdana was developed by Microsoft as a visual presentation font.

I love how fonts can alter a look or "mood" of a presentation. I love looking through all of the fonts to choose just the right one to say what I want in my PowerPoints. I think it is a very easy way for nonartistic people to make a visual statement. I think fonts could be used in many writing assignments to set mood. I have tried to get teachers to use fonts as a technique in poetry writing; but I haven't had too much success with this. I am really disheartened by how uninnovatelively technology is used in my school.