Tech Task 6: Storytelling and Storymaking

Storytelling has always been something that interests me. As an avid reader I love to lose my self in a good story, where for a short time the characters in the book become my reality. Because of this passion I found Alan Levine's presentation in my ECMP 355 class extremely interesting and informative! He has shown me that there are so many more ways to tell stories and engage your students in storytelling than I had thought possible!

For the first part of this Tech Task I decided to check out DS 106 where I completed two different assignments.

The first assignment that I decided to try was Phake Tweets. With Phake Tweets you create a fake Twitter post from the voice of a famous person or historical figure.
Here are two that I created

I think that this is great tool to be used in the classroom. Many students are already familiar with Twitter and use it on a regular basis, so this is a great way to hook the students attention. It also asks the students to think from the point of view of someone else, in this case you could choose someone who is related to whatever you are doing in class. The best part is Phake Tweets could be used in any class! You could create tweets as a scientist, a mathematician, an author, artist, or historical figure.

 The opportunity for inquiry is also here as the students can be given little to no information about a person before hand and they could research the person they are tweeting as to know what they might Tweet about or what they might use as a Twitter handle. On the other hand Phake Tweets could be used as formative assessment throughout and/or towards the end of a unit to see what the student's understanding of a particular person or events.

The Phake Tweet page is also extremely easy to use and is user friendly. All you have to do is fill in the blanks on the page with username, realname, tweet, and the date of the fake tweet that you are making.
It can be a lot of fun for students and allows them to express their creativity! I will be teaching a History 30 class in the fall and I am currently thinking of ways that I can incorporate this tool into my planning for this class!



The second assignment on DS 106 that I tried out was called Vocal Instrumental Mashup. For this assignment you have to take the vocals from one song and put it together with the instrumental version of another song. I had a lot of fun trying this out and came up with a couple different song mash ups in the end.

While this tool is not as easy to use as Phake Tweets it provides an opportunity for students to think outside of the box and experiment with new technology in the classroom. A short tutorial would probably be enough for most students to understand and be able to use this tool and create their masterpieces!
I think this would be a great tool in an art class, but I am still trying to come up with ideas as to how it could be used in other classes because I know that many students will enjoy trying to create their own mash-ups.