Our Digital Storytelling/MovieMaker Experience

This month, our group has been introduced to Digital Storytelling (DST) using Windows MovieMaker. We were tasked with using MovieMaker to create a DST movie that could be used as an example of how DST can be used in the classroom. As project leader for this workshop plan, I didn’t actually have to create a movie, but I really wished I had. This is the kind of project I love because it pulls so many different elements into it and allows for a lot of creativity. But I still learned a great deal from the whole experience. For instance, there was some confusion at first because our high school teacher group members, who both teach math, struggled to figure out how to incorporate their subject matter into this project. In the end, they both did a great job by using MovieMaker to create instructional tools. In fact, since our theme was “Using Digital Storytelling as an Instructional Tool”, all of the projects we generated provided examples of different ways to use DST/MovieMaker in delivering content.

For me, being the project leader and not having any experience doing DST myself was somewhat challenging. Fortunately, I was already familiar with MovieMaker and had created other MovieMaker projects. However, when our Mac group members struggled in uploading their movies to the West Georgia server, I was pretty clueless as to how to help them. I feel like this was the most challenging assignment so far for our group, partly because of things that were beyond our control, like the final size of the completed movie and having to upload the movies to the UWG server. But it was also challenging because DST using MovieMaker demands that you combine many technologies, and getting them all to flow the way you want them to takes some patience. Ultimately, however, I think we all came to see how valuable DST and MovieMaker can be for teachers.