Reflection- Digital Autobiography

I put about 30 minutes into completing my digital autobiography. I know that time and effort don’t have the biggest correlation though because I’ve spent hours reading and rereading the same page of a book before with little to no effort. For lack of a better way to measure effort, I would say I put about 65% effort into completing this task. I took a few minutes to look at all 4 options that were given to us to create the autobiography. I had used voice thread before and I hate hearing my own voice so I decided against that one. Photoshow seemed like a good enough website and I liked the options for editing each image. Vuvox required a login name and I didn’t want to make an account so I just glanced at the main web page before I decided to not use that program. I ended up choosing Animoto because I was really impressed with the video that Jeff showed us during class and it seemed like the easiest program to work with.

I really liked how Animoto let you upload photos from various locations, including facebook, and I used this feature to choose several photos from the album I had from my trip to Ireland. I think I spent the most amount of time on looking for music to accompany my video. I had an idea that I wanted an Irish drinking song to play with my video but most of the ones I could find online were poor quality. Luckily my mom knows just about every irish drinking song there is and she recommended one that I had learned to play on my violin when I was younger, the Irish Washer Woman. Once the music was picked the program made the video for me and it turned out way better than I expected.

Completing this task was valuable because it introduced me to several video design programs that I had little to no knowledge of before. This alone, I feel, was a beneficial impact on my future teaching because it added to my list of technological resources that I am familiar with. In order to use technology effectively, teachers must have a wide selection of technological resources that they are comfortable using. It’s one thing to know what a program can do but only through experiencing the use of a program can someone truly have competence in using it in instruction. I look forward to using more programs and technologies that I have not used before in this class. I also think that by giving assignments that require us to use these technologies is a great start in becoming fluent in them.