The electronic age has brought us into a whole new world of storytelling. Every era of mankind, the story “telling” changes, but the story remains the same: the common themes of human experience. The paper and binding of books, I think, will never be replaced, but there are now options that enable people access to books anywhere, anytime. I have to admit that downloading a book as I did last night on Ereader.com was pretty cool. A Barnes & Noble company, current books are not exactly cheap, but there are bargains to be found, and even over a hundred free titles (‘romance’ and classics). I downloaded Little Women for free and it displays brown text on a beautiful creamy parchment background. Very nice to read. And it could have been sent to a PDA such as a Blackberry or IPhone. So there’s another free source for books we can use in our media centers, along with others such as Project Gutenberg, Free-ebooks.net, etc. This is a list of places offering free books on the Internet Public library’s site: http://www.ipl.org/div/subject/browse/hum60.60.00/ I think our media centers would really do well to come into this new age of electronic books. My school helps students research and use the Gale and Galileo databases that we have access to including the online reference materials and encyclopedias, but has not delved into electronic books. An issue that needs resolved, though, is the feeling of immersing yourself in an electronic book will never be experienced unless you can get comfortable and read in your lap. Sitting in a hard chair looking up at a screen just doesn’t lend itself to reading for long. Some students could use their own PDAs to download books they need for class. But the media center needs to invest in some laptops, netbooks, or Kindle type devices for this to become viable. But I can see it coming, hopefully soon, and it’s exciting!
Learning how to make digital stories on Movie Maker seems straightforward enough, but learning how to include our emotions and express our thoughts in them is another. As Library 2.0 says, picking the most relevant images and clips is a part of it, but I believe the key is the background score and soundtrack. Finding the right music is so important. I think of movies like Titanic and Star Wars, they would be so much less without their music. Would Gladiator have been such an amazing epic without the Hans Zimmer score? Not only music, but a well placed clip of a speech can hit just the right note. Being mindful of the copyright laws for time plays a part too. It’s true that the movie we saw in class on the Sixties overplayed the one song, far exceeding the 10% rule, and it would have been so simple to have four or five shorter sound bites. Movie Maker enables volume fade in and out as we put them together, making the sound flow well with the visuals. Digital storytelling enables teachers to create them for teaching and students to create them for learning. Guiding the process is a media specialist who is knowledgeable with finding the resources and presenting the story.
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