Week 5 - What are the Pro's & Con's for Digital Stories?

Some of the Pro's of Digital Stories are:
1. By knowing how to make Digital Stories, I'll be able to make movies that match the curriculum and support the ideas that I'm trying to teach. I'll also be able to make age appropriate movies for the grade that I'm teaching.

2. Because children learn best from hands-on and visual learning experiences, digital stories are a great way to reinforce a subject that is being taught. The students are more likely to remember the material presented and find a connection to it when they can see it in a digital story format. They will enjoy their learning experience more when they can "see it" in action as well.

3. There are a wide variety of digital stories available for educators on the Internet that are easy for the teacher to download and include in their lesson plans.

Some of the Con's of Digital Stories are:
1. As I've been starting to learn more about digital stories, I've realized that it is a very time consuming process. Finding the right pictures to go along with the text and music takes a lot of time to complete. Because so much time goes into making a digital story, I would probably only spend the time to make a digital story for the larger more important units that I couldn't already find a digital story for.

2. Because digital stories are so widely available to download off the Internet, teachers could get caught up in using movies that don't really teach the curriculum or fit the subject being taught just because it was an entertaining video.

Video Reflection:
What I really enjoyed about both of these movies is that they were able to present a lot of information in a very short amount of time in a way that was very interesting. In the movie "Did You Know" they gave a lot of questions and facts. I found myself answering questions that they posed and being surprised when the answer I thought would be right wasn't right at all. It made me realize that America isn't as advanced as I thought we were in comparison to the rest of the world when it comes to technology. I liked how they were able to do all of this without any spoken words and just written text and background music.