To create my non-fiction digital story about Abraham Lincoln, I used One True Media. The program seemed simple but full of neat features. I selected photos from flickr to create my “montage” and added text and music to make it informative and entertaining.
While creating my story was fun and relatively simple, I certainly found a few shortcomings of the program. First, you may only use 80 characters of text. While I was writing a very brief biography, it would have been nice to have more space to write, as my sentences ended up sparse and choppy. Also, it seemed that every feature I tried required me to sign up for “premium” membership and pay a monthly fee. No thanks! I’m going to be a teacher, remember?
Also, it was nearly impossible for me to share/embed the video with the text showing up. I used HTML code to embed it into my blog- no text. I made it a YouTube video- no text. I realized then that using text was a “premium” feature of the program, so I bit the bullet and paid the $3.99 to be able to use text. Yeah, yeah, I know. I could’ve used a different program, found a way around it, etc. But at 1:00am after spending 2 hours on the project, would you?
The purpose of my digital story would be to introduce a history/social studies unit on the American Civil War or on Abraham Lincoln. I’d use it to entice and engage the students in the subject matter. I was sure to add interesting pictures and music. When I think of my experiences in history and social studies class, I automatically think TEXTBOOK. It is true that quite a bit of reading is inevitable in these subjects, so giving the students the chance to see some images and read just a little bit of text is important.
In addition, if students had unlimited access to this story after watching it, they could refer back to it in the future. Or, I might ask them to create a short digital story on a particular fact or person from a specific lesson, and they could refer to my example as a model.
Overall, while the tool was at times confusing, I think it’s very important to learn a lot about digital storytelling as it is a prevalent and excellent integration of technology.
Amanda Tyler's Blog 