Lessons Learned so far - Digital Storytelling Challenge

Our team at ATCAA has been working on the digital storytelling challenge as a way to learn how to use technology simply and easily, and teach our community about the power and responsibility of using technology for applications such as telling stories.

Here are some of the challenges/issues we have been learning about thus far:

1) Culture/Responsibility:  we have a lot of outstanding stories in our agency, but the idea of sharing stories publicly is not a simple part of the culture.  We work with confidential and private issues, etc. in subsets of the agency, so we need to establish guidelines and develop release forms to responsibly share pictures/videos/stories.  I have been able to collect a few copies of release forms we have used for photos in the past but these will need updated and used in the future for video/web posting and become part of our continued storytelling processes.

2) Attribution:  we don't yet have experience attributing photo/music credits.  To simplify I used stock photos we paid for, and approved photos taken by people in our agency.  I also used music provided by the application.  Creative Commons could be beneficial for us in this area, improving our ability to properly share and collaborate.                                                                                   

3) Tools - we don't have fancy computers, cameras or software at our community disposition, and we lack broadband connection (which is one of the projects we are working on for the digital storytelling challenge).   So we need to learn from TechSoup and Social Source Commons and leverage affordable and effective tools.  During the digital storytelling event we learned about Goldmail (but didn't use it since Mac isn't supported), we tried iMovie, and then late in the game read a post about Animoto.com and tried this.  The team really liked the free 30 second test video in Animoto, so we decided to use this tool for the challenge (we are still working on getting this to YouTube).

4) Support:  The digital storytelling event has been hugely beneficial to us since we have had a chance to hear from experts and ask questions real-time!  We will still need more support as we go a bit further with our storytelling efforts.  Forums such as this one are great ways for us to get answers and ideas!

5) Rallying community members.  Creating the story is definitely an important step, but then we need to send it out and get folks engaged!  Since we are not yet a very connected community, the channels are not yet developed.  But we do have early adopters and community advocates which should be able to help us in our challenge to spread the story.

I appreciate hearing about some of the other lessons learned in this process!

Life around the office was way too busy to enter the Tech Soup Challenge.  I appreciate the posting of all the guidelines, aids, and the winning entries.  The variety displayed was inspiring.

However, it did inspire me to learn how to use SlideShare with audio.

A conference was being held six hours away and our organization was invited to give a five minute greeting and description of our work. This was too far to travel for such a small time slot.

Sending a slideshow (using Powerpoint) with audio was a perfect alternative.

We used photos that were on hand, graphics created for brochures etc., text from our organization's tag line, mission statement, strategic plan.

Best part was Tech Soup Challenge emphasis on using the pictures and keeping it short.

Next time I would like to learn how to add music to the audio to accompany the slides and voice over the music.

Hi David--

Thanks so much for letting us know your experience with this. I'm glad it was useful to you even if it was a little too crazy work-wise to do the challenge part of things. I know learning a new feature can be a bit daunting (I learned a lot from the event too, not having known much about digital storytelling going in), but your story really illustrated how it doesn't have to be overly complicated and that it can be an inexpensive alternative for getting the word out about your work.

I think the music/audio piece would be a great next instructional piece of this. I am planning to have a podcasting event early next year that will demonstrate another kind of audio-only storytelling and include how to add music for audio/video/presentations.

Best,

Megan