*I am currently working my way through my fourth semester of the Information and Learning Technologies master’s program at University of Colorado, Denver.  This is the sixth post within a series of reflections that I’ve been assigned to write for a course titled Digital Storytelling.

Weeks 12 & 13

These last two weeks were quite fun!  Now that my understanding of digital storytelling has expanded so much, I’ve loved finding so many digital stories about food and food traditions (my theme for the semester).  I feel like I’ve learned a lot about crafting stories and using various mediums to convey meaning and create experiences.  My only wish is that I was able to spend less time critiquing and responding to other people’s work and more time creating my own.  I enjoy the daily creates very much, but we aren’t meant to spend much time on them when they’re intended to be created and posted within the same day.  With all the time spent searching for other work and then critiquing and responding to it, I have very little time left to do anything beyond what is expected.  But for now, I’ll just keep finding enjoyment in the phenomenal pieces I keep discovering!

• I visited the pyramid of Djoser for a Daily Create via Google Street View.  I think it’s amazing that Google has “street views” of so many incredible places!  I had no idea that they had images of so many corners of the world.  It’s such a phenomenal idea and I can already see how many ways this could be used for educational and storytelling purposes.
• I threw my best friend a party (my beloved pup) for an Assignment Bank project and struck up a brief Twitter discussion with a another dog lover in the UK!  One of my absolute favorite aspects of this course, is the interaction I’ve had with complete strangers who share the same interests or just simply appreciate my work!
• I critiqued an unbelievably phenomenal website from the National Geographic Channel called Eat: The Story of Food.  I know I’ve called a lot of things “phenomenal” throughout this semester, but I’ve meant it every single time!  This website is one of my most favorite things I’ve discovered for this course.  The designer geek in me is just in love with the look and feel and how it all works!
• I responded to another Nat Geo website for my digital storytelling resource (it’s more of a resource than a “piece of scholarship”) and lost several hours of my life to reading/watching/scrolling/clicking on dozens of digital stories about food.  I enjoyed every second of it!
• I revisited one of my favorite places in the world for another Daily Create, combining it with the wonderful words of Shakespeare, and thought of how this assignment could be used in a classroom.  I’m not a teacher in education, so it’s a little strange how my brain kept thinking of ways to use this week’s assignments in a class.  But I know I personally would enjoy an assignment like this in a writing course.  “Choose a photo you took yourself of a place you love, and write a story with that place as the setting.”  Yep, definitely sounds fun to me!  I also enjoyed reminiscing about my trip to this specific place and thought about making my own digital story using more photos from that trip.
• I wrote a response to Chapter 9 of Joe Lambert’s Designing in Digital, Working with Digital Imaging, Audio, and Video and enjoyed his explanation of originality in the design of digital storytelling.  
• And lastly, in keeping with the theme of hanging out on the Nat Geo site, I critiqued a digital story titled The Joy of Food.  I absolutely loved the images and quotes that the creator chose to use.  They truly conveyed the joy that food brings to people all over the world and it was really fun interpreting the more historical images.