[MUSIC] Lesson 5. Use high quality, interesting images that support the story. While they are writing the script, students should think about what kinds of images they will be able to use in their digital story that will add meaning and interest. The students generally search for online images first. But they often select low quality, low resolution images that appear first in their search query. A low resolution image can often ruin a digital story because of the blurry quality. Often, students do not realize that they can limit their search to high resolution, large size images in the search engine. On certain topics it may be more appropriate for students to take their own pictures with a digital camera. Scan images from books, newspapers, or magazines, or create charts and graphics in a program like Excel. Or even save PowerPoint slides as still images for use in their digital story. Lesson 6, use meaningful file names of images and other media. When downloading media from the web for use in a digital story, the file names should be rewritten using descriptive information without any spaces in the name. But instead, using dashes or underscores. In some cases, original images may have meaningless names that will make them harder to identify among all of the images that have been downloaded. For example, this image, of the rings of Saturn, was saved from the NASA website with this actual file name. 216200main_pia10246-516.jpg. It would be much better to rename this image so that the file name accurately describes what the picture shows. So Saturn-rings.jpg. Would be a much more appropriate name for this file. Lesson 7, create a detailed storyboard before creating the digital story. Creating storyboards is an often overlooked part of the digital storytelling process. And for many students, storyboarding may seem like a tedious extra step in the development. However, storyboarding can be a valuable component of the creative process by allowing students to organize images and text in a blueprint fashion before the actual creation begins. Storyboards provide a way to decide how the digital story scripts can be split up into individual pieces. Either with or without placeholder images. So that the student can then get a clear overview of their digital story plan. Because they can see the entire plan lied out in front of them storyboards can also inspire new ideas as well as let students rearrange existing resources before the final development begins when changes may be harder to make. Storyboards may be created on a computer using programs such as Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint as well as with specialized software such as Storyboard That. Storyboards may also be sketched by hand allowing students to complete this phase of development without using a computer. The most important thing to remember is that creating a storyboard is an integral part of the pre-development process that has many benefits and should not be overlooked. Lesson 8, carefully organize all digital story materials in one location. Our experience has taught us that a system for cataloguing all of the digital story materials will help students stay organized and allow them to more easily locate all the important files they will be using in their digital storytelling project. We have seen far too many cases where students have stored files in numerous locations, only to become frustrated and discouraged when these files can not be found. Here are some important organizational strategies for beginning digital storytellers. Before any work is done on the computer, students should begin by creating a folder on the computer, where all of the files related to the digital story can be stored. Inside this master folder separate sub folders should be created for the script, story board, text files, images, audio narration, music, video clips, and any other materials that will be used. This type of organization will make locating files much easier and will help students eliminate their frustration and confusion they invariably feel when they cannot locate important pieces of their projects. Storing all files in the master folder also has the added benefit of allowing the entire project to be easily copied to a thumb drive or external hard drive so that the student may work on the digital story project on a different computer. [MUSIC]