Week #3: Personal Tales
Through the Montana TALES project during the turn of the century (1998-2004), we found that teachers telling personal stories using technology learned skills and strategies that encouraged their adoption of technology in their classrooms. With that goal in mind, tell a two- to three-minute story for yourself using video technology. You may want to share a family event, a wedding or child’s birthday, or a story about a relative making a trip for the first time from Europe to America, or a camping trip to the Bob Marshall, or just about anything that you are very interesting in telling us. I’ve capped the length of this video tale so that it doesn’t become a half hour TV special (and so it fits as an upload to the blogspot) Also, please use iMovie or Windows Live Movie Maker so that you can edit your tale. Feel free to include still pictures, audio, or clips of songs to set the mood. It is possible to use MS Powerpoint and save as a movie, however, that option has caused some problems in the past. All Macs have a built in camera one could use, and if you have a webcam, that is sufficient quality for this particular assignment. Even your smart phone camera is good enough. You may try to borrow a video camera from your school, too. But if that doesn’t work, we have some flip video cameras to loan for a day, just set a time with me that we can exchange that. The tale is due as a video uploaded to your blog. The easy way to do this is to enter a new blog post, click the movie icon, choose the movie from your computer and upload it. Be sure you have time for it to upload if you are on dial-up connection, or preferably, use a high-speed connection. Post by midnight Sunday February 12. And remember, have fun telling your story. Don’t worry about the technology so much as the good personal story; we can solve the technology later, but the story is what counts.
I’ve attached a link to some sample tales, both personal and group tales from the Montana TALES project. Just to advise you, the link to the website montanatales.org within the sample no longer works as the web page is no longer active, but the video tales should work just fine as I posted those to another server for this class. You will find the same link in our class blog, as well as some tutorials for iMovie and Windows Live Movie Maker.
Finally, one must be aware of copyright laws and not use materials without proper citation and within the rules. As a quick guide, never use Disney characters (they have prosecuted teachers in the past), never use more than about 10 seconds of someone else's music (try out creative commons for public domain music and images), and never sell your work, only use for educational purposes (fair use). See some links to Copyright concerns in the class blog.
