My Digital Story

I made a few changes to my Digital Story. First I changed the beginning to show the title with an image that is faded in the background. I wanted the text to show up more than the picture. I changed one of my slides around to be at the end rather than the beginning so that us winning the title was not given away just yet. I paraphrased some slides that Dr. Lindstrom helped me with. I also added music throughout the movie to give it a little beat. Recording my voice with the story was fun and it motivated me to talk with an upbeat personality.

My digital story is about my cheerleading squad winning regionals for the first time in school history. My digital story includes personal images and music from The Script.  In this digital story I talk about how hard it is to practice and prepare for regionals and that cheerleading is a difficult sport. I show the excitement of winning a competition and claiming your plaque.

I think that my digital story creates an alternative to a stereotype typically portrayed in mainstream media. Everyone thinks that cheerleading is not a sport and that girls just stand around all day being prissy. Cheerleading is a sport and it is very dangerous as well. Flyers have to trust their bases to catch them when they are in the air. We don’t wear pads or helmets to protect us when we are flipping and stunting. I have fell on my head a few times from being dropped by a base and it is not fun. I hope that this video enlightens people on how hard cheerleading really is and that it takes hard work and dedication to become great.

Digital storytelling can help individuals develop critical media literacy because you have to interpret what the creator is saying and what they want you to take out of it. You have to be able to interpret the images and take away a meaning for them.  By creating our digital stories we were able to use a movie making software, that we may or may not have been familiar with before then.  Once we created our stories we had to provide our fellow classmates with feedback. By commenting on our fellow classmates stories we were able to look at their story and identify the purpose, dramatic question, the economy, the emotion, etc.. All of these things that we did with this activity helped us develop critical media literacy. We are able to look for different things when viewing the story and take out different points as well.