Creating a literacy narrative then
turning it into an Animoto slide show is unlike anything I have ever done. It
included many steps like making a timeline, then writing the essay itself and
finally putting it all together for a slide show presentation.
The
first step which was the easiest for me was remembering important events from
the past and turning them into a timeline. When making my timeline I noticed a
lot of important things. Like without help from my family I wouldn’t be the
literate person I am today. Another thing that I noticed is I like stories that
have more excitement with a set story that is easy to understand. The theme
that I though I would try to go for was based around different books that I read
over the years. I chose this because I had a pretty good memory of these events
and I think it helps readers visualize the level I was at. It took me awhile to
come up with this common theme but once I did it made writing the paper a little
bit easier.
The
second step which it thought was the hardest was the actual essay. It was hard
because putting a bunch of different events together to make a story that makes
sense is hard to do for me. Eventually I just decided to go in order by grade
so it was easy to put in chronological order. My partner helped me make the
essay more clear and helped me with a lot of other errors. I didn’t think anything
about the slideshow until I started to do it. But when I did I had to figure
out how to compress a 3 page essay into a 2 minute slideshow presentation.
Lastly
was creating the slideshow. This part wasn’t too hard, all I had to was get
pictures and shorten some of the most important text in my essay. My partner
did pick a lot of good sentences but I only used about half of what he said to
try and stay within a certain theme throughout. My strategy for the 52 character
limit was simple. First put the time period or grade in for the title then
under that put the shortened sentence down only using the most important words.
The hardest part of this was it still had to make sense. I used pictures for
more detail because the text limitations made it hard to get my full point
across. The pictures that I chose were all from the web and I chose them because
they directly line up with the text slide before it. If I was to do something differently
I probably would have tried to find my own pictures instead of pictures off the
web. The song that I chose was “Kryptonite” by 3 Doors Down. I chose this song
because it is one of my all time favorite songs even though it has no
correlation with the theme.
During
this process I learned lots of different methods of composing and compressing
my thoughts. I never thought I would ever take a essay and turn it into a slide
show in a writing class. Overall this experience will help me become a better writer
in a lot of different ways.
