Grade Weight: 15%
Peer Review Deadline: Wednesday, May 19th
Open Lab Hours: Thursday, May 20th (after class)
Due Date/Presentation Day: Monday, May 24th
Medium: Digital story combining written text, music, images (not video), and effects.
Description: For your first project you will compose a 4-minute literacy narrative or autobiographical story that combines a written narrative with music, images, and effects that support that narrative. If you choose to compose a literacy narrative, you may imagine "literacy" as being broadly defined beyond learning to read/write to include learning any complex skill. If you choose to compose an autobiographical story, find a single story that you can focus on to illustrate something about yourself. In other words, don't attempt to tell your entire life story in five minutes, instead choose an single, smaller, but significant event that you can represent through written text, images, music, and effects.
Requirements: your story must be about 4 minutes long and it cannot be longer than 6 minutes, so choose your words, images, music, and effects carefully. You must have a draft ready for peer review on May 19th. You are also required to submit an analytical cover letter detailing and explaining the work you did on this project, the decisions you made, and the changes you might make to this work in future. You must upload this digital story to your YouTube page and link to that YouTube page from our class Wiki. Your story must be an original idea, composed entirely by you. Your images and music cannot be copyright protected: all must be your own productions (your photos, music you created), within the public domain, or covered in some way under other fair use guidelines (remember our class discussion about this).
Special Challenges to Consider: because you are telling your story through written (rather than spoken) narration, you will want to consider your audience very carefully in producing your work. How many words on a single slide is too many for an audience to read in a short time; how much time will it take your audience to read each slide; where should you divide up your long blocks of text for best effect; what colors and fonts stand out best on each slide; how can you relay this story with fewer words without damaging the storyline; how can the images, music, and effects you choose carry the narrative; how can you provide reflection on the events using only a few words? Your audience won't want to just "read" your story: you want to provide them with an experience that combines as many resources as you have at your disposal.