Digital Storytelling

Continuing on with the theme of visual literacy we discussed the usefulness of digital storytelling. Digital storytelling is using computer technology to create and tell a story, basically making a movie or slide show. In class we watched an example made based off of a video game. There were no words, just music and anyone watching could figure out the basic story, even a young person.

We then for homework created our own digital story. There are many useful sites that are completely free, and allow anyone interested to create their own. Some sites you can create a cartoon based on a variety of characters, sounds, and scenes that allow you to add dialogue as you go. Alternately, there are other sites, such as Animoto that allows you to upload pictures, and music. This is the one I used. I posted pictures of me playing soccer here at school, to give people an idea of what we have to go through every day as athletes at this school. I mess around with a few different sites, all were fairly easy to do and pretty fun, so anyone could do them!

With the advancement of internet and the technology era, digital storytelling will become more and more useful as resources, particularly for teachers. In addition to this digital storytelling on the news and through the media can have a huge impact on those who watch them.

Visual Literacy

In the week following after learning about photoshop, we spent a good deal of time talking about visual literacy, and how important it is in society today. Visual literacy is often overlooked, but without it we wouldn't be able to recognize many things. For example an interesting point was brought up on a youtube video. Would you be able to find a restroom, or a gas station, or even a bottle of coke in a foreign country if you didn't recognize the symbol? In a way visual literacy is like an international language. A common misconception regarding visual literacy is that it only applies to photoshopped material, which is clearly not true.

Visual literacy is very important in a number of different fields. It is extremely important in educating children. Young people need to be taught in multiple ways, and its necessary to learn and interpret things in different ways and visual literacy allows for that. I found a very interesting video youtube which offers some unique points. Here's the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQNbAtK3c3g

In addition to being extremely important in the field of education, it is also

very important in journalism... most of the time the visual appearance of

something can be the deciding factor whether you read the article or not.

This is the same case with telecommunications and broadcasting.

Photoshop

We spent a good deal of time in class learning about photoshop. It is a tool used in nearly every picture we see in magazines, whether its through airbrushing or just editing things in or out of the original photo. It is both fascinating and terrifying how realistic edited photos can look. For instance in class we looked at photos that have appeared in the news, such as current event photos, as well as older famous iconic photos. We compared the original photo with the one that had been tampered with. Personally because I don't have prior photoshop experience, so it took me a while to figure out what had been edited into the photo. The more we looked at these pictures it became slightly more apparent what had been changed, but it made it obvious that the average person could be easily fooled.

Shortly after talking about this in class, we got to try out photoshop on our own. While it was fairly basic, I learned a lot and was shocked at how easy it is (once you've learned of course) to manipulate photos. The scary thing about this is anyone can access the software, if they're willing to pay for it, that is. In class we also learned how important it is for people, particularly young children to be monitored while online, because many pictures are so believable, that a child might mistake them for being real.

This is a topic that is important in my field of study, because when you are dealing with television, visual literacy, and news reporting it becomes that much more important to make sure your sources are legitimate.