Week 5 Reflection - More digital Story

It has been a great learning experience to work on photostory with my pod. It has given us a great opportunity to create, collaborate, and meet course objectives as we have done our photostory. Because the same questions as last week were posted, I will answer these questions as it pertains to our group work.
We have had a great opportunity to create a photostory together as a team. It has been exciting to hear some of the ideas that my other pod members have had, and to also be able to contribute some of my ideas as well. As we have created our photostory, we have had ideas that we don't really know how to do digitally, but we have sought out information for how to accomplish some of these different tasks. One of them is to have a line drawing on a map to show where we are headed on our virtual tour. We asked you how we could do this in photostory, and you said it would be best to create a bunch of slides, and have them change at a fast speed. This is something that I Probably wouldn't have remembered if we hadn't "created" for ourselves this photostory. This confirms the importance of having our students create for themselves in order to learn about different technologies.
As we have collaborated on this project, we have used a number of tools including e-mail and google-docs. Of course this collaboration requires technology. Without an understanding of technology, collaboration would take much longer. Again as we have collaborated it has been great to hear and get excited about new ideas. Our group has been very positive about everyone's ideas, which has created a greater sense of comraderie. This would be beneficial in the professional world among colleagues, as well as student to student.
The benefits listed above are evidence that these tools would be popular among colleagues, but another reason is because they are fun to make, and also fun to watch. I got a sneak preview of one of the Pods digital story about different careers. This was geared towards the early child, but it was so fun to watch because it was so simple and cute. It would really get a child's attention.
Our story follows objectives and standards of the Utah State Core, as we are taking our students on a tour of some of the different parks in Utah. This will help students to get to know the geography of Utah as they look at the map we add to our digital story, as well as some of the sites in Utah. I can't think of a better way to reach that objectives, since as we learned in the movies we watched this week, the best way to reach our students is through the use of technology.
Now that I have mentioned some of the many pro's of digital story, I guess the only con I can think of is the limited amount of resources available to students today. In the first movie we watched this week, it asked what congress would do about the populartiy and growing need for more technology in the school. It seems that it is difficult enough to get the teacher's paid well, and adding technology is just one more thing, but if we are really concerned about the students, we would lobby for more technology since it is what is most valuable to the 21st century.
I wanted to comment on the second movie since I haven't mentioned anything from that yet. I really appreciate that we don't have to purchase a text book for this class. Like many of the students in this movie, I never read text books that we get from class, and even if I do read them, it sometimes seems like irrelevant information. I also was suprised at how little students "create" written papers compared to written e-mails. I feel that I have learned the most about writing through e-mails, and blogs much like the one I am writing right now. If teachers want to be effective in what they teach, they need to get creative in finding ways for the students to get creative too. Technology is a great medium in exercising this creativity.