Developing a Digital Stroy

Several things come back to my mind when I think about last week's classes, but I will only reflect on a few. The Developing stage in the ADDIE modal is pretty self explanatory, and our team is well on our way in creating our digital story thanks to the class we had on Thursday. I think that digital stories will be an important delivery method throughout our group project. Science and weather, a lot of times, need pictorial representations because you can't always have examples of the weather you want when you're giving instruction. Something that wasn't gone over in class, but it was in the readings, is the section on cognitive load. Cognitive load refers to how much the mind can handle in the working memory.

Keeping in mind that the brain can only handle 5 to 9 bits of information at a time, our team needs to minimize the extraneous cognitive load in our digital stories and on our class web site. I think that I would like to work on this throughout our weather unit. I really like the subtopic in the readings about avoiding the split-attention effect. Our current digital story, I believe, is a good representations of an acceptable cognitive load and that focuses the viewer on the information that needs to be discriminated.

Going back to the class discussion on Wednesday about reviewing Modifications of materials/curriculum, I would like to go through the different Power Points that I have and key note presentations and modify them. I need to make them more visually friendly, keeping away from redundancies in information, but giving enough repetition for students to remember. With the digital story we have created, I have already thought of several digital stories that I can make, that will not only liven up my instruction, but help those musical learners retain information. Examples of digital stories that I can use in my classroom are the one our group is currently working on for severe weather, the effects of substance abuse, ways to conserve water, etc.