A Walk Down Storytelling Lane: February 2010

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Final Reflective Essay On blogging

Reflective Narrative on My A Walk Down Storytelling Lane Blog

Writing my blog posts for the Digital Storytelling course was an extremely positive assignment for me. From my first post about my being diagnosed with malignant melanoma and how I overcame it with surgery to my last post about creating my VoiceThread project, I felt that it was a wonderful way to express my feelings and what was going on in my life. It was very important to me to convey my positive feelings about doing whatever was necessary to overcome my skin cancer, and fortunately, I was lucky to be able to continue my SUNY-Empire State College Online Digital Storytelling course through fruition.

My intended audience was my professor and classmates as well as any other blog readers interested in my stories. I intended to evoke happiness and a strong will for survival that we all need to make the best of our lives. My creative process during my blog-creation activity was that I would first choose a subject from my course textbooks, except for my first post about overcoming cancer. In my second blog post, I wrote a children’s story about my favorite hiding place, but afterwards I always wrote about something that I had just learned during each module. Often I included some of my completed course assignments.

The technical considerations that helped my project were that I learned how to include hyperlinks and embed codes so that I was able to include related completed assignments on my blog posts, e.g., Wordle, Animoto Video, Jing Video, reflection narratives, and my final VoiceThread project so that readers could see the results of my course work. The highlight of my blogging experience for this course on blogger.com was that I believe that I enjoyed focusing all my attention on using the site’s capabilities for importing pictures, writing and editing the posts, importing hyperlinks and embed codes, and reading and listening to the videos, especially the one about Jonathan Livingston Seagull with the accompanying song, “Be” by Neil Diamond. I must have listened to that song on my blog dozens of times! I hope to be able to continue developing digital stories and to continue to create blogs for entertainment and hopefully for education purposes too!

Narrative For Anne and Tim's Love Story Video

I felt inspired to tell this story because my husband, Tim, and I have been very much in love almost since the day we met online on a site called Plentyoffish.com, and we decided to live together after several months together. He encouraged me to continue my education in writing, and he wrote, The Girl In The Window, which he said I inspired him to write. I wrote, Love on the Internet 2005, and The Love of My Life for him, and we just became inseparable! It is very important for me to tell this story because I have never felt so completely in love and happy with another human being. My intended audience is all my classmates, all the lovers and spouses, and all those who are looking for love. I hope that everyone finds their soul mate, and enjoys their lives as much as possible while you can. My husband, Tim, has given me hope and encouraged me to complete my BA and to write and live life to the fullest extent possible. I intended to evoke courage for everyone to complete their education and reach out to your soul mate, much as Julia Roberts’ character in Eat, Pray, Love was encouraged to do. My creative process during the activity was like a whirlwind of exploring the capabilities of my digital camera, uploading the pictures online, and trying to put them in an order that would make sense but not detract from the excitement and whirlwind love that Tim and I experience. I have to admit that I had a lot of trials with the audio and the timeline in particular, and finally I added a few title clips to make some sense of my momentos in my story. I tried to put together a storyboard from our pictures which I took every day for over a week. The fact is that everything that Tim and I have accumulated during our relationship has great meaning for me, but none of it would be that important, even the beautiful diamond engagement ring and wedding band and the new car we’ve recently purchased, if they were not from him! The highlight of my experience was that Tim was as much excited to take my pictures to use in my courses as I was to take his and my other pictures for the project. I felt technologically challenged to use all the capabilities of the Jing and Camtasia sites, and although I did explore and listen to several of the instructional videos, I know that I have a lot more to learn about making videos. I know that having made this video on Jing and Camtasia will help me to have an easier time with the next video I attempt to make. Also, I created several Captions which showed up on several of my pictures which I planned in the video, such as, “Home Sweet Home” under the shot of our condo, but for some reason, they did not show on the produced video, so I edited and added title boards. All in all, it was a very exciting opportunity to showcase my life with Tim, and I only hope that others will enjoy my attempts at conveying my love and joy in my life with Tim!