Digital Storytelling CEDO 530 - Week 2

Holy Cow - tons of work this week!!  I'm not sure how my neighbor took 12 graduate credits last semester - wow.  Anyways, moving on...
     We continued reading our two books, DigiTales and Presentation Zen.  I find Presentation Zen to be an easier read even if some of the ideas are hard for me to buy into.  I am staying open-minded though.  I think a person's presentation style should ultimately be a mixture of good presenting techniques and the strengths of the individual.  I will most likely never be the type of presenter that gives a ton of handouts, for example.  I think their distribution at a presentation is clumsy and they often end up being a distraction as people tend to look at them instead of listening to your message.  However, I will be more conscious of the strategy of using handouts to supplement the presentation instead of cluttering a slide and perhaps there will be a situation in which it makes sense for me to incorporate them into a presentation of mine.  It's all about keeping an open mind as you read these two books.  I've enjoyed the research-based findings and have been able to analyze my current presentation style.  I am more aware of the things that I do that are deemed effective and now I also have some ideas on how to change some of my bad presentation habits.
     VoiceThread was the web tool that we were able to try out this week and it made me think of several excellent classroom uses for it.  We almost have the email address thing figured out here at my school (K-8) so that shouldn't be a problem for us anymore.  Of course VoiceThread has the obvious application of having students use it for presentations.  It allows for voice files for narration, text comments on each slide, or even video narration form a web cam.  All great features that would add to the appeal of a presentation.  We haven't even touched on the best feature yet, however.  Collaboration.  I am guessing that our Civil Rights VoiceThreads will be used to collaborate with each other in much the same way that peers can make comments on a blog.  To get feedback and deeper questioning from peers is going to be the most powerful aspect of it's use, IMO.
     I'm still plugging away with the Posterous pictures.  I've found that the easiest way for me to do these is by taking the pictures with my phone and then just immediately emailing them to my Stritch email account.  I've played around with it enough now where I'm following 6 other classmates and I have it setup where the Posterous site sends me a daily email with everyone's picture updates.  Pretty slick.  There is a chance that I might use it once class is over but it most likely wouldn't be everyday.  It's one of things that just takes time and has to be in the back of your mind in order to update it enough for it to be useful to anyone.  It's less time consuming than doing a Facebook status update every 20min like some of these junkies which is why it's possible that I may still use it.  It'd be fun to get my brother to start doing it or cousins that I never talk to anymore or, even better, my family overseas.  I was able to hook up with some of them through Facebook but seeing pictures of them and seeing what they are up to would be really cool.