I found this project to be slightly overwhelming at first, primarily because there were so many directions I could take it in that would fit within the parameters of the project, and I could not decide what to do! Another issue came from having to find and learn how to use iMovie on my Mac, because I had never had to use the program before this course.
Overall, I'm really glad that I was able to do this project - not only was it a learning process that I can apply to my classes and teach my students to use, but also because I learned more about my subject matter than before. Prior to this, my students probably had more experience with iMovie than I had - now I'm on even grounds with them, at least for the moment! I posted my digital story on YouTube, and here is my story map for the project.
The reason I chose to create my digital story about homophones is because of a situation that arose in a few of my classes. We were talking about a sentence project they were creating, and one of the students finally spoke up and asked what the difference between its and it's was. That got the rest of the class started on your/you're/yore, there/their/they're, so on and so forth. We spent a good 20-30 minutes talking about homophones in length, discussing all the types the students had encountered, tricks of the trade in how to distinguish which ones to use when, and that's when it hit me: if I could create one story about homophones that the students would find corny but helpful, why not take that and apply it to the classroom next year? And not to stop there - apply it to punctuation and grammar as well.
So my goal this summer is to create different iMovies for parts of speech, punctuation, grammar, sentence structure, and then take those movies to my classroom and use them to show my students examples of what they could do before setting them loose on their own digital stories. I'm really excited about this prospect, because I firmly believe that you learn more about a subject by teaching it to others, and that would be the end result for my students - teaching their subject to the rest of the class.
