Reflecting on Digital Storytelling for Teaching and Learning

One theory of multimedia from the Swisher article that applied to my digital story project was The Modality Principle.  This theory basically says that students can learn better in a multimedia message if the words are spoken rather than printed.  This is exactly the format that I used when making my digital story, “Queen Priscilla’s Journey”.  I did not use any text on purpose to follow the ideas in this principle.  The theory talks about how people have two separate information processing channels, one for auditory and one for visual.  If there is spoken text and written text going on at the same time the learner can potentially become overloaded.  There are some cases when text with spoken words can be useful, like in a step-by-step procedure.  In the instance of a digital story like the one I created, this isn’t true and the ideas of The Modality Principle remain. 

Some ideas of The Coherence Principle from the Swisher article also applied.  According to Meyer, the author of the article, “Student learning is hurt when interesting but irrelevant words and pictures are added to a multimedia presentation.”  I kept this statement in mind as I searched for images and sounds to add to my digital story.  As I played around on iMovie, I was tempted to add sound effects that could have matched some of the pictures.  When I tried it, it seemed to be more of a distraction than anything else, which is exactly what The Coherence Principle talks about, leaving out the potential distractions.  In the end, I looked for images that clearly made sense and kept the story moving, as well as music that matched the mood of the story and was not distracting or confusing. 

When thinking about copyright and creative commons implications, I tried to make sure that images were available for use through the CC laws.  For the last assignment I only used images from a website called Morguefile.com.  I did think my search was limited last time, so for this project I also found some great free images through freeimages.com.  There was actually a much larger selection than I even though on this website.  There were a couple of images that I used from someone’s Blog.  I sent them a message asking if it was okay for me to use their pictures for this project, since I couldn’t find any CC listing anywhere on their webpage.  Again, in an assignment like this I wondered how you would give credit to photographers.  Would it be best to have a slide at the end of the digital story listing where you found each image?  Since the majority of my images were through free websites I did not include such a slide and it wasn’t clear through the directions for the digital story assignment.