Vampires and Digital Storytelling

Hey guys!

I chose to do a digital story for my multimodal project, link posted below if the video does not work. I also forgot to adjust the volume of the music when I was making it, so the music might be a tad loud.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkErlLL3K4o

The images came from google, and I used Kizoa to make the video, but uploaded the video to YouTube for easy access, as the link to the video on Kizoa itself does not always work. The music was downloaded from YouTube, I forgot which link or app I had downloaded from, as this song was previously downloaded. I chose to use the song "A Bard's Song" by Blind Guardian, as it seemed to go with my topic of the past. Bards were essentially people who told stories in song form. The topic itself is a little bit of history about Vladimir the Impaler, whom Bram Stoker's Dracula character was loosely based off of. The text in the ... not slides ... scenes. Yes, scenes of the movie is knowledge I have learned and remembered over the years. There is a lot more to Vlad the Impaler, as well as the history of vampires itself, but it would have been too much to put it all into this digital story, which would be used at the beginning of my vampire unit to give students background knowledge about history.

The reason for using Kizoa is because I had used it last semester for another digital story, and I was familiar with it. Though, I am still learning how to do the texts. This time around, I messed around more with the effects on the words. The effect is not how the text enters or exits the scene, but gives an effect to the words themselves, such as the bolded effect, or the stained effect where some of the text is two colors. I had not really messed around with that aspect the last time.

I also used canva to make the collage of movie titles in the first slide or scene (sorry, used to PowerPoint and slides!) I forgot that Kizoa offered a photo collage option, and found that after I had already made the collage in canva. I was also tempted to use canva to make my video, but I could not figure out how to get the pictures or photos situated without cropping, and went back to Kizoa. The only issue with Kizoa is that I had to constantly refresh the tab if I needed to edit a scene after playing and watching it. But, I still recommend it. It is a great tool, and they do provide templates, pictures, and music if you do not want to upload your own.

Digital stories gives more of a context than an oral story does, as an oral story does not include any type of visuals and it is not quite a textbook and including a song that goes with the topic and the scenes would encourage kids to engage and pay attention to the story, more so than just reading a textbook or a novel (not that novels cannot be engaging), but including pictures provides a sense of connection the students may not have noticed otherwise. For example, putting the collage of movie posters together allows students to see similarities and talk about the movies if they have seen them. Below is the picture shown on scene 1 with the collage from my digital story. I have included: "Dracula Untold", "The Little Vampire", "Underworld", one of the "Twilight" movies (I have not seen them nor have I read the books, but I know it is popular), and a picture of the novel "Vlad the Impaler". I am huge on visualization, and I hope I will be able to include pictures for connections in my own classroom, with my own lessons.