This I Believe Digital Story

This is the Youtube version. You can also watch it here for a superior audio quality.

Project II - This I Believe

My previous digital story was created through MovieMaker, since my team and I are all PC users. iMovie is probably a better choice and allows you to create a more polished product if compared to MovieMaker movies, in my opinion. So, for my second digital story I decide to skip MovieMaker and search for another software. That was when I finally found out toufee. Toufee is a flash maker website with some serious nice features. not only you can create a digital story, you can use a variety of flash makers for a website, such as banner creator,accordion maker, 3D carousel maker, flip book, among others . The flash builder, which is what I used for my story, it is a very friendly software, if you ever worked with MovieMaker or iMovie, you will probably find it very easy and straight forward. You can add transittions, to pictires and captions, include audio, and edit each picture and caption to the minimal details without completely losing your patience! Therefore, the post was more of a suggestion for you guys, try toufee.

Evidently, there are downsides. First, without becoming a paying member, you can only make a 30 second video. If you decide to pay the basic account, that costs 5 dollars a month, you can create long videos, but you can only publish them on the Toufee website. For the right to upload your video to YouTube, you need to make monthly payments of 8 dollars, and this premium account also allows you to use two other software of your choice. Another issue that I read about, is how you cannot save your project and, if the program crashes, you will lose it. However, I didn't have any problem saving my project and getting back to it later.. Maybe they have fixed the issue, maybe I was lucky. But what I really experienced was their customer service. I sent three emails in three days last week, and I received many, many emails saying that they had received my email and would contact me. Somebody did contact me saying somebody would contact me (!). Fortunately, the issue I had - posting the video to YouTube, was solved, and, after that, I uploaded the video many times without problems. And now i won't stop receiving updates on my inquiry. Actually, it reminds me of another problem, when you publish your project on their website, the audio is perfect, when you do it on YouTube, not so much.... Well, despite the problems I really liked toufee. If you think about it, the only problems are the audio in YouTube, because the limited free edition issue is something any software will have. Or maybe I just have low standards after dealing with Microsoft my whole life. ol But my point is, I would recommend toufee, at least a try using their free version, maybe? The result is satisfactory and look much better than you can achieve with again, MovieMaker, and without the headache.

This is a link for my project, which has a better audio quality than the Youtube video.

Lesson Plan and Rubric
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11Hjf1dsr-QYwj5YcYn26jkWXOW8KF7GHhrv3Ynoj0oE/edit

My 20% project

When Dr Penny assigned our 20% project, I knew immediately what mine would be. Since a long time ago, I have been planing to create a website/page for people interested in learning Portuguese. For many years, I have been tutoring and teaching Portuguese as a second language, and I created most of my material since there are no many good textbooks available, or, what surprised me, resourceful websites. Therefore I have compiled many worksheets, activities, games, and especially Power Point presentations that I created to use with my students, which could be somehow used in this idea of a website. I actually made promises of publishing some material for some of my adult learners, only to realize it would require more than my good intention to make it true. Maybe a n assignment that accounts for 20% of my grade is what I needed to "motivate" me.

So that is what I have been working toward throughout the semester, and it turned out to be more work than I had anticipated. Firstly, all my images were just taken from the Internet without any permission. So the first part of my project was to replace those pictures for images that I searched for and asked for permission, or drawn myself. After that, I needed to record my voice over the PowerPoint presentations, which is extremely time consuming, I must say. Then, I created a website using Weebly, sketched a plan for what the pages would contain, uploaded some PowerPoint presentations to YouTube, linked the videos to my page. Now I am working on short explanations of grammar points, and selecting some videos that explains and show Brazil and its culture, which I thought could be interesting. I also made available a few handouts, which I had to change to a PDF format. Therefore, my website is a work in progress, and it will take a lot more work for it to look like what i have had in my mind, but I am happy for having it finally started.

You can took a look at it, and let me know what you think!

My 20% project: www.portuguese4englishspeakers.weebly.com

Credits: image by Clix

Elf - Green Screen

This week we had the opportunity to learn the process of creating and editing using green screen in iMovie. First of all, it was a fun project, which is especially great at the end of the semester! It was also fun to be able to watch each other making the videos. Fun and embarrassing! Originally, I had the intention to dance with a instructor in a samba tutorial, but, when I realized all the class would be watching me doing that, I changed my mind. At the end, I happily accepted Eileen's invitation to make a video with her, after all, her elf video would be so much nicer than my dance video!

The editing part of the project was actually easier than I thought it would be, so it wouldn't be that difficult to have students create their own green screen, but it probably would be hard to contain their excitement. There are so many ways to incorporate this kind of project in a classroom: students can narrate essays, present videos or lecture about a specific subject, create report, or an entire educative TV news, and so on. Thus, it can potentially be informative, significant, instructive, and, mostly, engaging.

I hope you guys like our elf video!

Digital Storytelling Video - Second try

Giving it a second try

After our first attempt to create a digital story that didn't really please anybody, my group and I decided to put on an extra work in order to improve what we had done. I believe that our major problem was due to the fact that we didn't have good equipment to create our digital story, and, therefore, we ended up having a few problems, specially concerning audio quality.We had also made the choice not to use anything already available on the Internet; however, starting basically everything from scratch greatly increases work and the chances of having problems with the final product. And, in all honesty, it seemed like our efforts not to include material that didn't belong to us weren't all that important at the end. So it makes me consider what aspects of a project we fail to see because the lousy parts take all of our attention...So, in our second video, we ended up using video and audio with the proper citations, which is much easier and better, I must say. Besides, it was actually funny to see Synera under a blanket recording the audio, so it wasn't like I had to endure such a horrible time with this extra work, I actually had lots of fun with those two! But the whole experience made me think it is OK to fail at doing something since we recognize your mistakes and are willing to work on it, which is a valuable lesson to me, because I am too hard on myself most of the time.Furthermore, I also learned a lot of lessons with our first project: 1. It is easy to miss the good aspects of something when there are so many bad ones there (I believe our script was very good!); 2. Priscilla needs a new computer; 3. Synera's bathroom doesn't have good acoustics; and 4. we are such a great team that we had a good time recording the most "boring"video! (yes, I remember somebody commented it was boring....lol). Joking :)

Introducing the iPad to my nephew

During my trip to Brazil, I introduced my 4-year-old nephew to the iPad, and, consequently, to the concept of digital storytelling. I showed him the PuppetPals and Sock Puppets apps, which had the power to engage for a long time a very active and energetic boy! It was very interesting to realize how digital storytelling is indeed a very powerful tool to teach kids the concept of narration and foster their creativity and imagination. At the same time, those apps are so easy to create stories with, that kids have all the freedom to do their projects without depending much on an adult. By the way, I am just not posting one of the many stories he created since they are all in Portuguese.

So, based on my personal experience, I would recommend introducing kids to such apps, since, besides evolving the abilities related to storytelling, they will give you

a rest for several minutes. (lol).

And by the way, an iPad gets everybody amazed, doesn't it? My nephew loved it more than the Wii I brought him, and my dad joked that I should had bought him one, since "the FreeCell app is so much better than the one we play on computer"!

Technical problems

BlogPress refuses to work, so my only option was to post the previous review using the Blogger website, which i prefer when I actually have my laptop, but it is not ideal when using iPad. For some reason I don't understand, the website does not allow me to select an image from the iPad to illustrate my review. Therefore, when I finally have my laptop again, I will be able to do it. I just needed to share my frustration here!