Dear Future DS106er,
If you are looking for an online course where you can lay back and do the assignments on your time because the course is ONLINE, well you may not want take this online. This coure is intense and it is very important to stay on top of the assignments because there is a newone rolling in almost every week and you don’t want to get behind.
The first day I met groom for the online course meeting, his lecture definitely scared me and made me think twice about staying in this course. He warns you then that the course is intense and there is a lot of work. Trust me, he didn’t lie. I didn’t think that I would be able to succeed in this course especially since it dealt entirely with computer work. Don’t get me wrong I can function the basics on a computer, but the things he said we would be doing in that meeting, I thought to myself there was NO WAY I could do that stuff! However, I was up for the challenge.
The very first assignment ith simply created your own web hosting site I struggled with! It was’t that the instructions were difficult, I knew what I was suppose to be doing, but I just didn’t know where to start. However, Groom gave GREAT tutorials to guide us through every difficult assignment and once I got a hand on this tutorial for the creation of the website, I was able to set things up without a problem. After getting through this first assignment, I was anxious to see what we would be doing with our sites. This anxiety reassure me that I should stay in this course!
We played with our sites tools creating different appearances, plugins, and all along blogging every move! I was loving this course at this point because I realized this was not going to be the usual class!
The assignments were definitely out of the ordinary, but very interesting. One of my favorite assignments was the daily shoot assignment where each day we had to take a picture of the given theme on the daily shoot. However, once i got to audio/video I had to add a few other faves to the list. I never would have thought that I would be able to create a video movie. This was loads of fun and in my spare time I mess with the video and audio tools that I had to install on my computer. I don’t think that I can really say I hated any of the assignments. I enjoyed doing every assignment and in how many classes would you hear a student say that they actually enjoyed doing an assignment EXACTLY!
Overall, I would say to the future ds106ers to definitely stay enrolled in the course or if you are not enrolled get enrolled. Digital Storytelling definitely opens your eyes up to every aspect of the web! Social networking, blogging, video, audio, ect!It is a great opportunity to take a class out of the norm and the course material will be very useful in the future! If you stay dedicated,focused, and determined and have fun with doing the assignments, you will not regret taking this course!