Digital Storytelling and Presentation Tools in Action

     This past Wednesday, my class and I were lucky enough to have a Google Hangout session with Abigail Harrison, also known as Astronaut Abby. At the age of 18, Abby hopes to be the first astronaut to Mars. She has accomplished so much already such as writing for publications (NASA) and watching space shuttle launches. She has started a nonprofit called Mars Generation which aims to inspire students to be leaders. Some advice Abby has offered when using social media to develop a career includes minimization and keeping private pages private. She also strongly recommends to use the 24 hour rule which involves contacting a person you meet within 24 hours on social media and reaching out. Abigail's most beneficial social media tools are her website, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

     In class, we also discussed a variety of presentation tools other than ordinary PowerPoint. One tool that I personally found interesting is Office Mix which is a free add-in for PowerPoint. It allows you to screenshot and even input a video recording of you talking. Sway is also interesting because it allows users to easily build a story board by dragging information. Emaze allows users to create amazing 3D, walk through presentations unlike anything else. Some Digital Storytelling websites include Animoto, Pixton, and GoAnimate. My personal favorite is GoAnimate which has built in templates making presentations extremely easy to create.

     In "5 Reasons to Replace PowerPoint with Google Slides", 5 top reasons to make the switch to Google Slides are discussed. Reason one is that slides is built for collaboration. Slides allows users to easily share and simultaneously edit a presentation. Reason two is that Slides encourages simpler presentations which in turn creates cleaner presentations. The Google Slides app makes it possible for users to access Slides offline. You can even access these presentations from any device. The final selling point of Slides is that you can easily publish and share your slides on the web.

     In "Things I Like about Animoto for Education", likes and dislikes of Animoto are discussed from an educator perspective. Animato offers many free themes and styles to choose from. Animato makes it so easy to create detailed presentations within a short amount of time. It is cloud-based so students can work on their projects at home or in school. The best feature of Animoto is that it forces students be concise with their information and not fill the screen with words. Some problems include the lack of autosaving, how long it takes to preview your video, and there is no way to share video projects with different accounts.

     In "Xtranormal for Education", Scott Little goes in depth about Xtranormal and the components it contains. The tag line states "if you can type, you can make movies" and Little agrees with that. You start by choosing from actors and then either typing or recording what the characters are going to say. Users control gestures, backgrounds, and different angles. The cost is $10 a month for teachers and $.50 a month for students. Teachers then create assignments and control many aspects of the movies. Xtranormal allows students to demonstrate their knowledge in a more creative way.