Chapter 14 Reflection

Even though most of the chapter sounded quite obvious, there were a few things that I liked a lot. For instance, I liked the author's very accurate remark of not overdoing the persuasion in digital productions, because

when students use new media to support a particular point of view, it looks too much like advertising.

Jason B. Ohler. Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning, and Creativity (p. 177). Kindle Edition. 

 I have thought about this a few times, too. Whenever there is an assignment of persuasion, the student outcome/product often sounds like an advertisement. Even in a simple assignment like the one I assigned to my Earth Science students not long ago. After quite a bit of research and reading on the topic, they were to create a PowerPoint/scrapbook of their point of view on whether or not humans are responsible for global warming. The products ended up to be pretty much advertisements for hybrid cars :).


Also, a quite powerful quote that I want to post here, was the following:

Without the visual, you're annoyed. But without the audio, you're lost.

Jason B. Ohler. Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning, and Creativity (p. 184). Kindle Edition. 

 This is my personal favorite quote. There is a story behind this. When I just arrived to the States, I knew quite a bit of English. Since it took a bit of time to enroll in school, I was home a lot and watched a lot of TV. When I watched American television, I understood most of it. However, because of the time change, I often found myself wide awake at night and needed something to get my eyes tired :) So that meant that I either needed to read books or watch TV. Like many teenagers, I chose TV over books. There was very little on at that time, so I ended up watching Mexican soap operas. Because it was at night, I was mindful of the volume and would make audio very low. I have tried putting the TV on mute a few times, but that just killed everything. It was very boring to watch because I lost all the story plot. And that's considering that I didn't know any Spanish... I still absolutely needed the volume in order to be able to keep watching. No audio = "no comprender". Crazy how our minds work! :)