Checking in to my Feeddler account to see the etmooc blogs over the last week saw a plethora of posts about Digital Storytelling, even before Darren Kuropatwa’s session. I didn’t have time to read many, and tended toward the ‘six word’ stories and 5 card Flickr’s – guessing they might be short! My initial reaction about how could I use this in my maths class was reflected by lindapemik ‘s post Digital storytelling in Academia? You’ve got to be kidding! Reading her post made me reflect that maybe it wasn’t such a stretch. I am, in fact, planning to get my students to write blogs about their learning in maths, so maybe I am in some way on the right track.

I watched the archive of Darren’s session this morning. There’s still a lot I can’t see myself doing in the near future, but it was still worthwhile. It’s something i can see myself directing other teachers in other faculties to. For myself, some small, but significant to me, take outs were 1. I loved Darren’s suggestion of adding to the common ‘what have you learnt today?’ blog prompt, ‘What did you contribute to the learning of others?’ 2. I hadn’t heard of dropitto.me, a way of having others send files to your dropbox without having to share the folder with them and 3. jamendo the creative commons music site. This last is not necessarily something I will use myself, but it’s valuable to be able to direct students to it. Finally, a not so small one, a reminder of the power of adding an appropriate image. With this comes my responsibility to make sure that I am up with all the copyright requirements and creative commons details so that when I encourage students to add images to their blog posts, I am also teaching them how to do so appropriately and legally, either using creative commons images, correctly credited, or using their own images. Given that I want their blogs to be both a reflection on their learning and an e-portfolio, using their own work is the obvious way to go.