Thing 6: Digital Storytelling

While I do a lot of media creation and digital storytelling with students, this is an ever changing and growing arena of technology tools, so I always welcome an opportunity to explore new options and dig deeper into the creation capacity of familiar tools.  For this assignment I focused on the solutions for student creation being rolled out in Adobe Spark, and creating within Powtoons. 
This week I rolled out a project in a Spanish 7 class in which students were asked to create Travel Videos to entice tourists to various Spanish speaking countries using the five senses.  The teacher had used Adobe Spark in the past, but at that time the regulations within the program meant she had to allow students access to her account for them to create, because most of the 7th graders were still 12 years old.  Recently Adobe Spark created an Education option, allowing schools to connect their student Google accounts, which solves that student access challenge.  I worked with my tech department to make this connection possible and the rollout to students went very smoothly.  They are in the creation phase now, and will be heavily relying on the resources I provide through my
Media Creation Tools document.  This is a document that I leave intentionally varied and broad to allow for maximum student empowerment of tool selection in their learning process.
In addition to Adobe Spark, I used Powtoons to create a promotional video for our April Literacy program of Bookopoly.  This is a tool that I have used in the past, but I usually suggest it for a certain style of video and I wanted to explore how versatile it could be.  Creating this video gave me a small glimpse into the potential for creativity and opened up other projects that I do to potentially using Powtoons.