In my exploration of technology’s use in education myself and two of my classmates are investigating digital story telling and how students can use it in their learning. We are documenting our game of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) using video and learning what tools are best and how to use them.

This week I explored editing down long form video. I used my GoPro to film our four hour session and then experimented using iMovie to edit the footage to a more digestible length. Through this process I learnt that this is a very time consuming method of digital storytelling.

Firstly, there is a lot of footage to go through. For this project I was looking at editing down nearly two and a half hours of video. It was going to take me at least five hours to edit that and I have a fair amount of experience with iMovie. I edited several year end videos for the UVic rowing team while I was an athlete. Another consequence of having so much footage is the time it takes for download and upload. I made several attempts to edit this video but was unable due the time it was taking to download the video from my camera to the computer. Similarly, uploading video to the internet takes a lot of time.

Secondly, I was not able to record the entirety of our session. As mentioned previously I had two and a half hours of footage and our D&D session was four hours long. This left out many memorable moments of our campaign.

Overall, I would not recommend that students use this method in their digital storytelling. The combination of missed content and time necessary creates a product that is not worth the effort. Over the next couple of weeks my partners and I will be looking at other methods of digital storytelling.

The feature image on this post was found on the wikipedia commons