The theories that I relied on for creating my digital story
drew from dual coding, the multimedia principle, and the modality principle. The
basis for creating my digital story ties into dual coding because of my goal to
try and present students with a visual representation to correspond with the
auditory component. By triggering meaningful connections between the images
that I displayed and the format in which I was speaking. For example, when I was
discussing the different types of renewable energy, I did not come out and
specifically say, “solar panels” when I was narrating, I said, “harness the
power of the sun.” Because most people are familiar with at least what a solar
panel or a wind turbine look like, there was no need to address what the image
was exactly, rather I was able to trigger a connection between the idea a
student already has about solar panels, and assimilate it with a new
understanding that renewable energy could help save our planet.
Touching
on the multimedia principle, research has shown that students perform better on
retention tests when given narration and animation at the same time. Although
this was not a “true” animation in the sense of an animated GIF, the concept
still seems to remain the same. By presenting pictures to my students with no
text, and using narration, I hoped to prevent the cognitive load from becoming
too great to handle. In addition, the graph that I used in my story was used to
“convey relationships between variables” (Swisher, p21, ¶ 1.) The idea was to
have students quickly see the graph, but with little text to fully explain it, I
was able to draw a connection between the growing world population and the
demands on energy. Lastly, I hit on the modality principle when creating this
story by presenting the words in a spoken format rather than a written format. One
thing that I will consider for future digital stories is a concept from the
coherence principle, in that all extraneous material should be removed from the
presentation. In this circumstance, I felt that music played a powerful role in
accompanying the message that I was trying to get across. However, this may not
always be the case, and so depending on what type of message or information
that I am trying to convey, the consideration for removing the music would take
place.
The process
of selecting images for this presentation was slightly arduous, just because
there were so many pictures that I came across that did not have information
clearly stating the licensing information. Because I was unable to positively
identify whether or not the image was in the public domain or had a creative
commons license, I did not take the chance, and was unable to use those images.
My process for selecting my images took a different format than what I have
done in the past. After I wrote my first script, I went through and made a PowerPoint
presentation with each image, the author, the source link where I retrieved it
and the category that it fell into. Using this process helped me keep track of
each image that I wanted to utilize, as well as it made the attribution process
a lot easier because I was able to quickly pull the information I needed from
one source and was able to compile it in the credits portion of my video, as
well as include all the links in the description box when I uploaded it to
YouTube. Even the pictures that were in the public domain were given
attribution in my presentation. The only thing I was unsure of was there were a
few images that I used that I personally took when I went to the zoo. When I used
those in my presentation, I wasn’t sure if I needed to post those to a website
like fotopedia, or Facebook so that they had a source on the internet to be
linked too. My assumption was that because it was my own work, I was able to
use it in my presentation as I saw fit, and if I wanted to protect those images
from being used again, then I would need to upload them and assign a creative
commons license to them if I did not want to place them in the public domain.
The one thing that I really like doing when I use images for projects that will
be made public is to hyperlink each image with the source it came from as well
as the author information. In this format, this is not possible because the
links would not be active in windows movie maker or the converted YouTube file.
Personally, I don’t like the look of long web address links or strange author
names, but the process of adhering to the attribution license requires it, so
until I figure out how to display the information differently, the process I used
will have to work.
On a
side note, I just wanted to say that I was very intrigued by the process you
used to have us create this project. When you described that you wanted us to
make something that influenced students emotionally or intellectually, it
instantly got me thinking about what topics would influence me in one way or
another. After I put some thought into it, my passion and intensity to create a
dynamic presentation dramatically increased because it was something that was
of interest to me. I have noticed that I am more likely to put 110% into something
when it is being created for a purpose, as this video was created with the
intentions of emotionally altering the way students feel about energy
consumption.
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