I love photography, more so I love the stories they tell. This week we are tasked with completing 12 stars of visual assignments. That being said I decided to start with a four and a half star assignment called story map.

This assignment asked…

Using Knightlab’s Story Map, create a map telling a story of a trip you took or would like to take. Include pictures. They can be your own, or from flickr (just give them credit).

Before I get into the nitty gritty of the story map I created I first want to say that I love how this assignment allows for individuals to tell a specific story through essentially the use of pictures.

The instructions for this assignment said to use Knightlab’s Story Map. This is a website where you can easily create interactive maps. When creating your map you can import photos, headlines, captions, stories, and more. The best thing about this site is that it is super user friendly being so simple to work. I have had to create other maps for previous classes with this application so when the assignment asked for me to use this I was more than thrilled due to my experience.

I decided to tell a story of a trip I took. Ultimately I was brainstorming a vacation where I traveled to several places, by doing so it would make my map more interesting to look at. If there were limited locations it would certainly be boring. However I have never been out of the country and I believed a trip like that would be great to document due to all the different places people usually go.

After some thought I decided to map my family trip up north to the New England area this past summer. I figured this would be best because of the numerous places I went while traveling. So with that I created a map telling the story of my trip to New York City, Providence and Newport Rhode Island, and Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

The map I created titled “New York, Rhode Island, and Cape Cod Oh My!” is one that tells a story of a small piece of my Summer. I mapped out a total of ten different locations. With each location I attached a photo and an explanation of what occurred, what was seen, done etc. I ultimately wanted viewers to be able to experience my trip even though they weren’t on it with me.

This type of visual story is effective in my opinion because of the realness that comes with it. It’s an interactive way to immerse yourself in something and in some peoples cases possibly get lost in what you’re doing. While I was creating this map I was taken back to my trip, reliving every moment, almost feeling as if I was back up north again.

Once I finished I thought to myself this would be something really cool to show my family who took the trip with me. I feel as if they’d appreciate it as it would in some ways serve as a memory album of our time spent together. My biggest take away from this assignment is that photos indeed do tell stories whether it’s the photos I attached in my specific map or the map itself. While words serve as a great purpose in storytelling, photos act as voiceless stories, still just as effective.

For this assignment, I did Story Map. For this assignment they wanted me to use Knightlab’s Story Map. However, I wanted to make my own. So I made my own, “story map” of all of my pictures from when I went to Italy spring of 2015.

Since we were on the topic this week of “Is photography dying?” I wanted to add that I took all of the photos in the show on my iPhone. There wasn’t much  thought process on how I did this. I saw “story map” and immediately thought that doing my trip to Italy would be the best!

I used iPhoto slideshow to make it. There were a few things I changed from the original I had. For example, some random pictures that I didn’t know made their way into the album some how. Other than that, I had a lot of fun doing this one and it went by like a breeze.

For this photo map I choose a vacation I took in 2012 in Colorado. I went through my pictures and found ones that were spread out through the area of CO that I was visiting. I think that this assignment actually turned out quite well and I really enjoyed using Knightlab.

https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/8c4b724da153d3c206aba0fff6777205/colorado/index.html

Nice

For this week’s DS106 Assignment we got to choose a topic based on our interest.  I enjoyed the visual assignment I completed a few weeks ago, so I decided to try a new one.  There was one assignment that caught my eye last time but I didn’t take the time to figure out the website I had to use to complete it.  This week I have more time so I tried again, turns out it wasn’t that hard!

Omaha Beach

The assignment calls for you use a website called StoryMap to create an interactive map telling a story of a trip you took.  Last summer I went to France to meet up with my mom who lives in Madrid.  This story map is a very cool website that allows you to add pictures, descriptions and captions to a places you have visited and adds a pin point of that exact location on an interactive map.

Applying StoryMap to the Classroom
This would be a really cool activity to incorporate in the classroom.  When kids comes back to school they could make a story map of a trip they took over the summer, winter or spring breaks.  They could also use story map to accompany a history project, for example the route Christopher Columbus took, or the history of their family and where they came from.  The website is fairly straightforward and could be taught to a class easily.  Story map is a great replacement for the old-fashioned Power Point!

*The only thing I would change about Story Map is being able to add more than one picture per place.  I Googled it and the creator said he didn’t want to make it too complicated (not sure more than one picture would complicate it, but oh well).

Unfortunately, I could not figure out how to embed my story map using html so you’ll have to click through the link to see it…sorry for the inconvenience!

France 2014