Moving Mountains in Ms. Morrison's Class

The ECE block at JSU spent our class time in ECE 309 playing with a handful of new apps for digital stoytelling. While this may sound like a waste of valuable class time to some, this is one of the best ways to learn about technology. A room full of future educators learning and sharing ideas for different ways to use these apps in our practicum classrooms and our future classrooms, what could be better? “Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.”  ―  P.D. James ,  Advice to Writers: A Compendium of Quotes, Anecdotes, and Writerly Wisdom from a Dazzling Array of Literary Lights We have transcribed this quote from P.D. James into the technology filled, twenty first century classroom. 

When I was little, my mom and I would read at least one book every night. As I got older, the books turned into chapter books and those chapter books turned into trilogies, chronicles, and entire series. I have very found memories of sitting in my mother's room before bed reading The Chronicles of Narnia and how excited we would both get (because she loved reading the books just as much as I did) when Mary Pope Osborn would come out with a new Magic Tree House book. All of those books were good, old fashioned paper and ink and I still have them, although now they're packed away in boxes for my kids in the future. That form of storytelling is out-dated for this new generation. While students today still like the tradition of reading stories, they want more pizzazz. They want characters that move. They want to narrate the story themselves, hit a button, and replay it to their peers. Like everything else in their age, they want it DIGITAL. Digital storytelling is the relativel...