Teaching Clouds Through Digital Story!

For my digital story, I chose to teach a short lesson on the 4 main types of clouds found in the troposphere. I think that this lesson would be most suitable for fourth or fifth grade students when they are first learning about weather. I have had one previous experience with creating a digital story, but it was with the program Windows Photo Story. I was excited to learn and use a different type of technology for this project. My experience overall was really good, but I have to say I do prefer using Photo Story over Voice Thread only because I had some difficulty figuring out how to change the identities for the voice recording and can see my students having the same problems. I definitely enjoyed creating the digital story and will use it in my classroom someday.
There are many reasons why digital story could be such a beneficial tool in the classroom. One reason is because I feel that it could be used for all age and grade levels. There are many small adjustments that can be made for younger students to use this technology more easily, as well as many options that a teacher can use to challenge older students. For example, for younger students, I could have them learn and teach each other about communities by giving them the images to use and having the voice recording be more of a question-and-answer style. Also, the presentation could be very short. For the older students who are more comfortable with exploring new technologies, I will have them research for their own pictures and information, as well as create their own script and maybe even require them to add music or other sounds to their presentation. Either way, I think this technology is going to benefit all learners. For the audio-visual and body-kinesthetic learners especially, this tool will allow them to create a learning tool for themselves where they can see visual representations and also hear about the topic. I think that this technology would be most successful in group work. Since there is typically a lot of stress and anxiety caused over having to stand up in front of the class for group presentations, I think that it would be new and refreshing to have the groups to create digital stories instead to share with the class. Besides, I feel that these digital stories would be more attention-getting for the other students watching than regular presentations. For younger students, it would be good for them to start learning how to use technologies that they will use the rest of their lives, and for older students this tool would be useful because then the teacher could just post the digital story online for all the students to access for studying. I am definitely very comfortable now with using the digital story tool and look forward to using it effectively in my future classroom.