Christmas Podcast

For my podcast, I've decided to create a narrative of a Christmas list. In my family, we always send Christmas lists by the first week of November. It never fails that people wish they could have been more descriptive (to reduce how many exchanges they have to negotiate). So...since I was working on our family lists, I decided to narrate them and send the audio file instead of a typed description. It was fun to work with Audacity. I will play around with it more to do some layering and other fun things.

My experiences with Skype have been all positive. My husband and I used Skype while he was deployed overseas. It was pretty reliable, and he is tech-challenged, so the plug-and-play aspect was very helpful.

For my students, I would likely use podcasts as a brainstorming mechninism as well as the ability for me to give feedback to individual students. Since my students cannot receive audio files (deaf), I would need to keep my responses in video format for podcasts, but the practice working with audio files got me thinking about other ways to use these programs. This Christmas list practice session might lead me into snipits of information for my other websites and sending my voice for particularly special e-mails (rather than lifeless words on a screen).

I couldn't get the autoplay to stop happening (even when changing the code), so here's the link: http://mediamill.cla.umn.edu/mediamill/embedqt/50093

My Cruise Video

I was trying to come up with something really creative, but I ended up just using still shots focusing on my 2009 cruise. Since I don't have access to iMovie, I went with Movie Maker. I was pretty impressed by my classmate's ideas and use of imovie, so hopefully that's a program I will get to spend some time with in the future.

I have done lots of video and photo editing with my former students. I even taught a TV broadcasting class. We didn't have enough computers when we were working on projects, but it was always wonderful to see how creative and unique their productions turned out to be.

I would like to learn more about hypertexts embedded in videos--that isn't something I know anything about. Digital storytelling is an accessible way for low language students to tell a story and then expand to writing or another kind of literacy skill.

Here is a short video of photos taken on my cruise last August. I couldn't get the embed code from Media Mill, so I went to YouTube to get the embed code.