Celebrating Texas Voices

On April 18th & 19th I had the excellent opportunity to attend the StoryChasers Celebrating Texas Voices Workshop at the Education Service Center for region 17. This was the first ever Celebrating Texas Voices workshop. StoryChasers is a non-profit organization based in Oklahoma. StoryChasers seeks to enable all to become digital storytellers, archiving our stories and our histories. Celebrating Texas Voices is the educational community for all Texas digital storytellers.

In our two-day workshop was an amazing trip getting new digital storytelling tools (a backpack filled with a digital camera, voice recorder, headset & microphone combination, and a new flash drive), and learning the software to help us share our stories. The most interesting and challenging part of this experience was trying to write the story to tell.

I am inspired by the amazing teachers around me today, and look forward to teaching my students to tell their story.

My first StoryChasers story for Celebrating Texas Voices

Dragging Feet and Dragging Change

This week seemed like a rippled look into a past life. I don't procrastinate often like I used to, but this week I did. Our assignment asked us to write a short 500-700 paper with 5 sources. Are you kidding me! I can write a short paper with a few sources. I can write a long paper with a lot of sources, but a short essay--not research paper mid you--with 5 sources is ridiculous. To make matters worse there was no prompt. I didn't ask for a topic, just a prompt. So what did I do, I chose to avoid writing until 10:00pm on Sunday evening when the assignment was due by midnight. My best work? Probably not! I know I could have done better, but to limit the thoughts from five rather long sources to only 500-700 words is like a slow academic death. Don't get me wrong, I don't think the answer would be a longer paper either. It just seems to me that if you want quality analysis, which I did not have in my short paper, then either sources or length needs to be adjusted.

Again, not as proud of my writing as I usually am. I started off feeling creative, then ended feeling powerless to the limited questions to my interviewee and the overwhelming amount of information that could work with my theme. If youare bold enough to dare you may look at my wiki to see my assignment Dragging Change.