Learning About Digital Storytelling

We're approaching the halfway mark in my Digital Storytelling course, and I'm having a great deal of fun, but boy is it hard work! I try very hard to follow the story-planning and writing instructions of Maguire, Lambert and Miller in their textbooks. Keeping a blog is the most fun part to me, and there's so much to write about with all the extensive reading, planning and writing included in this course.

I recently purchased a new Sanyo VPC-S141414.0 megapixel, 4 zoom digital camera to help me capture good, up-to-date pictures and to load them on my computer to use in my blogs, videos, and social networking sites, like Gather.com and Facebook.com. It took me several hours to figure out how to use the camera adequately, but downloading the pictures and uploading them was really fun! The hardest part of the course for me is meeting the deadlines and ensuring that all the links to my assignments work. I posted my 2nd Assignment Video, "Anne and Tim's Love Story: How Two Writers Fell In Love With Each Other's Writing," just below this blog post, and my Narrative About Filming this video to the right of this blog.

I'll be posting a couple of pictures of my hubby, Tim, and I that we took at a local park and Starbucks with this post. We really enjoyed taking them, especially with the beautiful and colorful Fall foliage which I hurriedly captured since Fall is my favorite time of the year here in New York where we get the change of the Seasons! We've really been enjoying this Fall's harvest and have visited nearby Secor Farm as much as possible, and we're planning to get a picture of the farm the next time we visit, but that's another story!

My Childhood Place

Hiding in the igloo that my brothers made one Winter day, I didn't realize that my Dad had arrived home from work. Usually, on warmer days, I bathed my doll in her toy tub on our front porch and when Dad arrived home after a hard day's work, he picked me up and kissed me hello. I always loved when he did that! I thought about dinner as I was growing hungry, but I was secretly enjoying the solitude, away from my brothers, in that igloo!

I love my family very much, but in our household of eight, there wasn't much peace and quiet. It was growing cold even though Mom had bundled me in my warmest coat, and thankfully, I began to sing "Are you sleeping?" despite my teeth chattering, and Dad was able to hear me and find me. He admitted that he had only listened to my singing for a very short time, enjoying it, until he stuck his head into the igloo and called to me and chuckled, "There you are Little Anne!" When Dad brought me into the kitchen, Mom was busy preparing dinner, and my brothers and sister were all doing their chores or working on homework.

I've always wished that someone had taken a picture of one of the igloos that my brothers built each Winter, but if they did, I had not seen it. I know that we still have many records, including 45s, that were common in those days, and I plan to ask my siblings if they have "Are you sleeping?" that I used to love. Dad only lived until I, the youngest, was fifteen years old, and I would love to have that record as a momento!