The country of Afghanistan-the setting of the award-winning novels The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns- is the focus of my individual digital project. Due to the fact that I believe students may have little (or maybe inaccurate) knowledge and perceptions of this region, I believe that it will be very useful for giving them a better understanding of the novels’ setting and the elements within.
When I began working on the project, I thought that I would do my project on part one of A Thousand Splendid Suns. I decided to note unfamiliar words and places while reading through the book. Once I came up with a list of these concepts, I began to research the information. Once we were asked to storyboard the project, I began to realize that I needed to narrow down what I want to include in the video.
After talking with Dr. Dail, I decided that I would trim my video down, and propose it as part of a series. This move relieved a lot of the stress that I was beginning to feel. Meanwhile, I continued to search for images to include. I attempted to use sites (like Flickr) to obtain the most relevant pictures. Due to the fact that I wanted the overall feel of the project to be like a tour of the City, I wanted to use pictures that had actually been taken by tourists in the region. I also began to download sound effects. My goal was to make the viewer feel as though they were truly on a trip in Afghanistan.
After putting all the images and and sound effects into place on the storyboard and timeline in Windows Movie Maker, I began the fun task of recording my script. I will be honest and say that I had a difficult time finding the right volume of the microphone. I am pretty sure that some of the audio in my video is not consistent, because I had to record it in chunks.
Publishing my video was the most challenging part of the entire assignment. I could not get my video to publish until I started a whole new project, and transfered all the work piece by piece. I had to save the work in pieces as well-just to make sure that it was going to publish in the end.
Overall, I feel like this assignment was a good experience for me. For one, I learned and put into use a lot of technology skills that I have never used before. Secondly, it let me experience the frustrations and triumphs related to completing such a project. Now, if I assign a similar project in a future class, I will know what to expect from my students, and also how to help them troubleshoot the problems.
