Pro Blog Post 7 - Digital Story

For my book, "Back From the Brink: Saving Animals From Extinction" written by Nancy, F. Castaldo, I chose to make a digital story which may have turned out to be a Public Service Announcement (PSA) on Kizoa. This is my first time creating a non-recorded video with music, text, and pictures, but it was a fun way to let my creativity flow. Normally, I only make Power Points, but there is so much more that can be done with video making. Though, I still prefer Power Points because they are more in my comfort zone, but it is important to try new things and explore outside of the box, or outside one's comfort zone.

With the book I chose, I knew immediately what I wanted to do because there is a section on wolves, and wolves are my favorite animal and I wanted to spread awareness about the importance of wolves. The music I chose for my video fit very well with my text and pictures I included in my video and I think it adds a bit of emotion and intensity.

By using a movie to convey the message, it can reach more people in this world of media and online, as almost everyone has access to the internet. A movie also makes it more entertaining as opposed to just hearing someone speak, as some voices tend to be monotone and there is always more than one way to convey a message. It is also beneficial to have the lyrics or the music line up to the images or text that the message is trying to convey.

I would encourage multimodal devices for my students to help spread the word about the cause or causes they wish to take up as said previously, it will reach thousands of people if posted online and it will raise awareness at a very high rate.

Please enjoy the movie I made and the link may ask you if you would like to be redirected, and make sure to hit 'yes' or to click on the link it is redirecting to.

https://youtu.be/fnE0NC--tLA

Note: For some reason my Kizoa link was not loading the video on my end, so I decided to download it and upload it to youtube. It has been awhile since I uploaded a video, and I did not realize I could edit my videos on youtube as well! I may try to use youtube for my next project, but that would be another learning curve.

Pro Blog post 5 - Writing

I think most students want to to know why they got a certain grade they did, or for them to clearly see where points were taken off, and I think a lot of students tend or start to cater their writing styles to what their teachers are looking for, so they do not have their own voice; they are just simply following the prompt and the rubric, and I think teachers need to be a bit more open minded about what the students write, as well as specific to the students. Yes, most teachers will give the rubric to the students prior to the paper submission so the students know what the teacher is looking for, but rubric's can be confusing. I know when I am given a prompt and rubric to work off of, I am confused because it does not explicitly say what the teacher is looking for and I have had other classes just give the assignment, prompt, and in detail what they are looking for with no rubric, which makes more sense to me. As a whole for the student base though, I think students also want consistency with their assignments and that they do not want to write about the same topic multiple times. Students want a range of freedom within a topics and a variety of assignments, but the grading would need to be consistent.

I have had classes where I would have the prompt, discussion, etc (stated above), no rubric, and it would be on a topic I did not necessarily care about, so I would not give that paper or assignment the time it deserved, but I would somehow get an A (perfect score; 100), but there would be no comments. In my Egyptian mythology class I took a semester ago, I got a ... I think 99.5 or 98.5 out of 100, but I did not know why my paper was docked (and I never asked the professor), so there is still that psychological component of: "where did I go wrong? What didn't I do that needed to be done?" Teachers need to give feedback and a why they gave the grade they did, and if the student has a lot of corrections they could make, the teacher should allow the student to edit to increase their grade.

From peers, it is hard to say what students need from them because they may want their friends to read their papers in order for them to get affirmation that their paper is good and makes sense. However, some students do not take constructive criticism well and if a peer makes a comment or suggestion and the teacher takes off for that suggestion or comment, then that could cause conflict between students, and not all students want their paper read by their peers, as often times, students will have the same questions and not necessarily know what to look for. A writing coach on the other hand, is someone a student may not necessarily know and a writing coach is there to help improve the student's writing and there are some students who may not want the help or take the writing coach's comments seriously and I was blessed that the students I worked with took my comments to heart and thanked me for my help and I enjoyed reading their papers and I got to learn some information I had not previously known before.

For my link this week, it took me a little bit to find one as I did not necessarily know what to search for, but ironically enough, I came across two blogs:

https://writingcooperative.com/how-to-just-write-c1e613f48171

https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/08/07/improve-writing-skills 

The first blog just talks about how to write and not necessarily focusing on any grammar or spelling, but to just write and the author goes through some steps on how to make this happen. One of the steps requires finding the courage to allow others to read what you have written, which can help alleviate some anxiousness for submitting assignments or allowing peers to read the writing. The second blog (again, kind of ironic) I connected with immediately due to: "Nothing strikes fear into the heart of a marketer quite like being asked to write a blog post". While I am not a marketer, when I saw the syllabus and that we had to write blogs for this class, my anxiety and stress started to soar and my brain immediately began to overthink because I had never done a blog before (which apparently I had in French class in high school, but I blocked those assignments out of my brain). The author then describes a variety of ways to improve the writing, including but not limited to: brushing up on the basics, dissect readings that you admire, and accept that first drafts are never perfect.

Digital Storytelling - Pro Blog post 4

My experience with digital storytelling I guess begins when I started playing video games. After reading the article "Place-Based Digital Storytelling" by Chisholm & Trent, it got me thinking about how playing an online multi massive role playing game (MMORPG) could be counted as digital storytelling. A MMORPG consists of creating a character, which is a different persona than that of the player sitting behind the computer screen, as in the game, the player will only see the character they created, non-player characters (NPCs), monsters, and other players' characters that were created. Most MMO's (multi-massive online) will have their own game lore, as well as quests that the NPCs can give the player to earn better equipment, items, and experience. The quests will sometimes explain the lore, but most people ignore it to get to the game's content. For example, I play an MMORPG called "Dark Age of Camelot" which has three different lores of storytelling in it, but one does not need to know the lore to play. The game is divided into three realms, and each realm has x amount of races, and x amount of classes, and race/class combinations. One realm is called Albion, and the main city is Camelot. The races include Highlanders, Avalonians, Britons, and a couple others. The classes include Wizards, Sorcerers, Paladins, Clerics, Theurgists, and many more. One of the dungeons is called Stonehenge Barrows, which is a dungeon in the middle of a Stonehenge, and another place called Hadrian's Wall, which I just found out was a real place and that is just one teeny tiny introduction. But, the creators included lore from stories that players would know, or could research if they wanted to.

Other than gaming, I took a storytelling course at UWM online, and the way we told stories was by posting on online discussion posts on D2L. While we did not record ourselves, it still required us to type out our stories and post them online. However, I would be interested in taking this storytelling to another level by creating a video, as storytelling has always been interesting to me, especially with how far storytelling has come, and storytelling has many forms.

The forms that I enjoy are digital storytelling (as mentioned above), book trailers, and video essays. I feel that these three give the most creativity for creation and output. I feel like these are the three I would use the most in a future classroom to promote writing for students. With being creative, there is not necessarily a wrong answer. One can make up a story in a creative writing class, and create a recording with images. If the student wanted to, they could record themselves telling a story with an accent, or fit their story to a song they enjoy that would fit the topic or story they are portraying or telling to the class. A video essay may intrigue a student who does not like to write, but it would encourage them to write at minimum a script and still require them to search for sources. As for a book trailer, it is similar to a digital storytelling video in the sense that the student gets to have fun making a creative project with images, music, texts, or even voice overs that talk about a book they have read. All these options still require the student to write, but the writing portion itself would not be as daunting to the student.

I got really curious, so I searched for digital storytelling in MMORPG, and found the following two articles. I should have mentioned earlier as well that it is not just MMOs that have storytelling, but many video games do, and there are different varieties or genres for video games. There are: Roleplaying Games (RPGs) such as Skyrim and the older Final Fantasy games that are single player, but have more of an open world feel; there are turn-based or real time strategy games such as Warcraft or Heroes of Might and Magic; and of course one has to mention the Pokémon games which are based off the tv show, but took their own spin with the games, which still follow the storyline of the show in a sense. Anyway, the first article talks about how people want a rich storyline with good character development and that it is more important in gaming. The author says: "As a gamer, you’re not the viewer, you’re the actor! We find ourselves quickly invested in the characters because we’re not just watching them; we’re interacting with them. No other form of media can do this. Gaming places you in the story. " This is what makes gaming unique. I highly recommend reading this article. The second article requires one to download the pdf, but it gives a bit more of a background to gaming as an overall concept, and gives a bit of insight as to where gaming started and where it is going. As I had said earlier, storytelling in general has been around since ancient times, but the modes have changed. Before video and PC games got big, table-top gaming was the next big thing, which is how Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) got so big. While DnD is not digital, it still required the Dungeon Master (DM) to read handbooks and create a story for their group to enjoy. The group would then build their own character on a character sheet, and the stats (strength, intelligence, wisdom, and more) were figured out by rolling a 20-sided die, and their characters would be portrayed with a figurine that would be placed on a dry erase map on the table. Each player (including the DM), would take turns. Some people would take DnD a step further and do a live-action role playing game (LARP'ing) which is where the group would dress up in costume and act out what they are or were doing.

https://www.mmorpg.com/columns/interactive-storytelling-evolution-2000094484

https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/AIIDE/AIIDE09/paper/download/799/1062 (will direct you to download the PDF version.)

Role playing is still going on and has been used in classrooms. For example, in a previous class, I was roleplaying as a teacher and a classmate was roleplaying as the parent of a fictional student. We did this twice. Once was for a parent-teacher conference, and the other was to talk to the parent about a problem the student (their fictional child) had. I hope to use this form as well as the other methods to try and make the classroom interactive and fun, and another means of students to learn and be involved with one another.