Reflections about... Reflections!

What an impressive semester! This semester has gone by so quickly! While in TPTE 486, I have learned about flipcharts, inspiration software, blogs, class websites, and iMovies. This has been a busy semester!

Inspiration software was something that I found to be easy to use, and I feel that it will be applicable

in many contexts in my future classroom. One way that I used the software this semester was with a web to identify emotions.The web that I made showed different emotions that students may feel with branches of synonyms stemming from the emotions happy, sad, angry, and scared. Visuals were included for students to see how these emotions may look. I believe that when students with disabilities need to work on learning their emotions, this will be a great activity to use.

One of my favorite things to learn about was movie editing using iMovie. Watching the student examples was very helpful and I learned so much about movie editing. I enjoyed making a movie about Independence Day to use in my classroom. The movie will be useful for social studies lessons and also as a social story. When using this movie as a social story, students will view it to grasp an understanding of why Americans observe the holiday, the history behind the event, and how people observe it today. Example of families celebrating are shown to demonstrate what the event may look like to students. Fireworks are depicted towards the end of the movie to prepare students for the explosions being set off, and that this is a happy event, not something to be fearful of.


Overall, I have become more proficient with technology and learning how to troubleshoot when issues arise. Taking this class helped me to learn new ways to integrate technology when teaching in the future.

Critique of University of Houston Digital Story Website

The digital storytelling website by the University Houston contains a wealth of information. The "About Digital Storytelling" page explains the background of digital storytelling, which began in the 1990s! This page describes digital storytelling as similar to traditional storytelling but may also include computer-based images, text, videos, and music.

When creating a digital story to use in education, there are 10 elements outlined on the website that are considered essential. These are: the overall purpose of the story,the narrator’s point of view, a dramatic question or questions, the choice of content, clarity of voice, pacing of the narrative, use of a meaningful audio soundtrack, quality of the images, video & other multimedia elements, economy of the story detail, and good grammar and language usage. Knowing these elements and keeping them in mind as you make a digital story are important.

The "educational uses" page gave great ideas for ways that teachers may incorporate digital stories to enhance lessons. It has ideas for students to create their own digital stories as well, which I think is a great idea.

Exploring this website gave me lots of great ideas to use in my own digital story!