Key competencies

Today our students began their own digital stories. We looked at some examples that show how simple an effective story can be - The Cat Herder EDS advertisement, and the Playstation Boy (PS3) both from YouTube. The idea of this was to show that it is the idea that grabs the viewer's interest and for example in The Cat Herder - it is taking an old one and adding or changing one of its dimensions. A further suggestion to students who struggled to come up with a storyline was that they start with a fairy tale and change a dimension - this works well as the storyline is already there and already full of goodies and baddies.
From here they collected images - some had their own cameras - and some downloaded existing images in to photoshop to create a folder of images for use in their draft storyboard.
Ten minutes prior to the end of the session students were asked to save their work then record and reflect on what they had done today in their moodle blog. Once they had spent a few minutes on this they were then asked to write about what they would need to do in tomorrow's class to build on what they had done today, and take their story to the next step.
One of the main achievements in today's class was that some students who had not interacted with others before have now begun to work cohesively as a team to fulfill a purpose.