In this chapter, Ohler discusses the essential tools that teachers and students need in order to tell digital stories. The following statement hit close to home for me in my attempts to create digital stories the past few weeks.
"Fancy gear and software is not important. When it comes to effective digital storytelling, less is often more." (Ohler, 2010, 2214 of 2900).
While creating our first video, my new laptop had an issue with the video card that would not allow me to add captions to my pictures. In order to post my video, I dusted off my seven year old laptop which allowed me to create my video in about fifteen minutes. I have since downloaded the updates to the driver on the new laptop which will allow me to use Window's Movie Maker, but only after I spent four very frustrating hours attempting to pinpoint the problem.
This week I realized that I only had hard copies of many of the photos I needed for my digital story. I wasn't worried because we have a fairly new printer/scanner/copier that should be easy to use and scan and save my photos onto my laptop. Unfortunately, some of the printer colors were running low and the printer would not allow me to scan photos until I replaced the ink cartridges. This seemed silly because I wasn't going to be doing any printing, however it refused to let me bypass this control. My solution was to pull out my old HP printer/scanner from the bottom shelf of the closet which worked perfectly despite being over seven years old.
This weekend I will be moving to another location and both laptops and printers will be taking the journey with me. When it comes to hardware and software, it is more important that the tools can get the job done rather than how many complex functions are possible. In my case, the less complicated the tool the more likely I will be to make use of it effectively.
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