Kim Brain Rules 2-Storify
I chose a technology at random after reading chapter 2 of Brain Rules. I feel like choosing a technology before discovering what it’s for and then trying to adapt it to my notes for the week let’s me better see a program’s capabilities and shortcomings. This week I tried out Storify. This program allows you to bring together various web content to tell a “story.” Much of the web content you can integrate seems to come from social media and you would need to have an account to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc to pull any content from these sites. Thus, Storify seems to be intended to tell very personalized stories using personal content. There is also a Storify search that searches what other Storify users have included. I found next to nothing, however, when using this search function. You can also search and pull content from Youtube, Getty Images, Flicker, Google, and a GIF database, though, and I had varying levels of success with these searches. I was disappointed in the image selection available from Getty Images and Flicker. The selection was limited, and searches often brought up completely unrelated images to the search terms. I had better luck with the GIF search. As such, I was able essentially created a BuzzFeed-type page of text and accompanying GIFS. Students who are familiar with BuzzFeed might really enjoy writing notes or sharing information about a topic in this way. I think a fun project for students might be to translate a research paper into a Storify page. Additionally, through the Google content search, Storify might also be an interesting way for students to begin working on a research project, especially one that is using or relying on web content for information. In this way, Storify could work as almost an annotated bibliography with students’ text summaries and the web articles themselves housed all in one place. Overall, Storify was very easy to use, and I think students would enjoy using it. My only negative experience was the limitation of images available to include.
This week I reviewed Shantal's Prezi on Brain Rules Ch. 2 (the link in her post didn't work for me, but I'm pretty sure this is her presentation) and Amy's Timeline on New Learning Chapter 2.
Shantal and I highlighted much of the same information from the chapter, but what I really liked about her use of Prezi was that movement was literally highlighted as we moved from the different slides on her presentation. For a chapter focused on exercise, this meta-experience of a discussion of the importance of movement while incorporating movement was really cool. I actually have yet to use Prezi before, but I am excited to try it to move beyond the basic slide structure of PowerPoint.
Amy's timeline seemed like the perfect way to capture the paradigm notion from her chapter, while also clearly demonstrating that these paradigms often exist simultaneously. Amy and I took opposite approaches in terms of planning our note taking technology; her planning and forethought really paid off because the timeline structure really helped me understand the historical progression this chapter seems to be portraying. The ability to include graphics also helped me get a better sense of the nature of these different educational paradigms. I found it really interesting that Amy notes you could create other organizational structures besides the horizontal timeline. Like Amy said this capability allows you to really think about the relationship between ideas and concepts and therefore what is the best way to demonstrate them.
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Discussion of "Kim Brain Rules 2-Storify"
Kim Brain Rules 2-Storify (Comment by Heather)
This looks like a really cool tool. In fact, I feel like I have seen these before on blogs but didn't know how they were created. You said that it seemed best suited for personal information? I'm pondering what types of assignments this would be applicable to? Perhaps for a class introduction on the first day (assuming its a small class)? I feel inspired to play with storify next week!As to the reading, it seems that we must tell Dr Rodrigo that we would like to participate in future coursework while playing outside. It seems only fair that we apply the lessons from her assigned texts! :)
Posted on 9 September 2014, 9:09 am by Heather Laslie | Permalink
Amy's comment
I can see all sorts of uses for this in freshman writing courses! I too would be wary of the constraints associated with a program that depends on opening access to a user's social media content to another program. But as Heather already noted, this would be great for narrative assignments, even rhetorical analysis projects! This reminds me of the Intel Museum of Me project; have you seen that?Posted on 11 September 2014, 5:48 pm by Amy Locklear | Permalink
building on student's preferences
I like that you are thinking about apps students already use and how/why a new one might connect with them more easily.Posted on 24 September 2014, 10:50 am by Shelley Rodrigo | Permalink
Kevin's Comments of Kim's Storify
This might be something that I can do with my Freshman Inclusion class. I guess I will know better after I've experimented with it a bit more. Perhaps it would be good for the students' to demonstrate plot summary.Posted on 3 October 2014, 6:53 pm by Kevin M. Norris | Permalink
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