Reflection on Digital Story

Creating my digital story about my skydiving experience was fun. However, it was not free from difficulties along the way. I gathered all my pictures and organized them easily. Voice Treads made it easy to put my images in the exact order I needed. Adding audio to my pictures in the layout I wanted became more difficult. I saved my pictures and came back later to add audio, thinking I would be able to move the pictures as a slide-show every 4 seconds while I talked non-stop through the entire production.
However, I soon discovered that I could only add audio for one picture at a time. After ten minutes of confusion, I figured out how to do it by having the slide-show running, but pausing each picture to add my story narration. Another minor problem I encountered when adding audio was that the fan of my computer constantly runs, which made it sound as if I were vacuuming in the background. I couldn't drown out background noise as an option, so I just spoke as loudly and clearly as I could without sounding as if I were yelling. The end result still has a faint sound of the fan, but sounds much better than my first attempt.
After adding audio was completed, I realized that about half of the pictures needed the audio redone because it wouldn't play for them. There was no plausible explanation for this because I'd recorded them all the same way. However, after re-recording, the audio worked fine. I also encountered difficulty when trying to post the link here on the blog. The original link I posted was inside my personal account, so I deleted that, and, after some experimenting, finally got the correct link posted. I discovered that I needed to let the audio automatically playback after I had recorded instead of just skipping to the next slide. Maybe there is an easier way to do it, but it worked for me.
I can see how difficult a project this could be for an elementary classroom. I would probably do this as a class group instead of assigning individual students each to do it. Carefully explaining the tools of Voice Thread (or whatever media is used) is a definite must for students to be able to create a final project and encounter minimal difficulty along the way. This could be a fun and exciting project for students. As long as expectations are clearly stated and help is available for each student, I look forward to doing this project in my classroom some day.
I'm happy I was able to complete this project. Voice Threads is a fun way to begin making video/audio recordings. While my computer doesn't have the capacity to create much more with higher levels of technology right now, I look forward to making more digital stories in the future.