ds106 – Digital Storytelling

DS106 Set Title Image  ~ Photo by Brian Metcalfe

What is ds106 and what’s awesome about it? Well, after searching and reading up on the ds106 website, I can tell you that I found some interesting things. First, ds106 is basically a digital online course on digital storytelling. Digital storytelling is a way where a person can share their own “true story”  through a short story that involves interaction.  Included in this site are multiple levels of participation, where some create an activity daily, like us, or some create these assignments here and there.

To begin, you need to set up a few things before you get rolling. These things include your gravatar, a way to identify yourself, you need a twitter account, Flickr account, and Soundcloud account. Once you have all the basics set up you can move onto the daily create challenge. From here you can pick an assignment or activity to do and share it back and interact with others on the site and the world. There are numerous activities to pick from. These activities include: visual, audio, writing, drawing and photography activities to name a few. It was nice to see the wide range of activities and the numerous examples that were available to see how certain activities were created. These activities are to help us develop our skills in technology and also get our creative juices flowing.

I must admit, I am nervous about this whole challenge. I am not very good with technology nor do I feel that I am very creative. So, I went and looked at some the posted challenges that were completed by others. One was under the design activities. Here the assignment was to play around with the print of the letters in your name.  Cool letters. net was the website for this activity. So, I put the letters in my name in the box and appeared different fonts and type of my name. I thought that was pretty neat, simple and I think that I could handle a challenge like this. The next one I looked at was called Tongue Twister. This assignment had you say a tongue twister and in the background was some music and you needed to put the two together. To be honest, this is getting out of my comfort zone, mixing sounds together, however, that is what this is all about. Trying new things to get us out of our comfort zone and try it for thirty days.

I think that this definitely will be a challenge for me, to complete these activities on a daily basis for thirty days. I am nervous yet ready for this type of challenge with technology. I think that this will be a good experience so maybe one day I will be able to create lesson plans with some of these different types of assignments. I can see older students liking the name assignment, and it would be fun to do this with your students names on a bulletin board in your classroom. You never know, I may end up liking these activities and extent on past the thirty days.