marmara ELT

USING DIGITAL STORYTELLING IN ELT

Hello again my blog readers,today we are together again with a new topic:Digital Storytelling(DS) in English classes...DS is a great tool in ELT both for students and teachers but what is it?How can it be used?Are there any  specific rules in creating digital stories..Let's have a look at all of these questions while having a detailed x_ray examination of DS...
        Ds,in short,is telling stories of all kind by using digital multimedia such as images,video,audio and combining them with digital graphics such as text,narration,music,slides to present information on a topic.Ds can be categorized in three major groups yet there are many different types of  digital stories.1-personal narratives 2-historical documentaries 3-stories designed to inform the viewer on a particular concept or practice..Türkan -my pair-and I choosed the third type and prepared a digital story of liquid soap making process.
    As in all digital story making processes our first step is to come with an idea:how to make liquid soap at home:))..secondly we searched and gathered information about the process..thirdly we wrote a script about the process..step four was planning a storyboard which was the skeleton of our body...step five was taking pictures while doing real soap at home and combining them to become a slide show..than we attached the most suitable lovely music to our work and some graphic images to attract more attention...step six was putting all the material together to create a visual feast...after many corrections and small changes when we came to the conclusion that our work deserved to be shared we published it in you-tube..I would like to share a small secret about our video is  that the little girl in the video  is my own  seven years old daughter so we had the chance to create a tight budget work:))
       We are so lucky that there are enormous numbers of free and handy tools in the internet to produce professional digital stories..In our work we used PicLab to write on the slides colorful texts and we used VidLab to gahter the slides as a movie and add music.We also used a software called Proshow to organize all the staff..At the end you tube channel helped us to broadcast our work..We didn't have any difficulties except squeezing our work into two minutes as it was the part of our task and also digital stories' nature is not to take so long..Moreover we enjoyed a lot while creating our story and we explored a lot..Collaborative work also allowed us to ease the work and shared ideas added richness to our work.At the end we prepared the same video by using different tools and wished to show you how you can varify your production  using different tools..Please watch the same video in different costumes..
          Today's students are digital natives..They are kinestetic learners.Teachers should not overshot the opportunity to provide their students with high-technologic,rich content tools such as digital storytelling...Teachers with a little technologic knowledge can also achieve this..Most important is the courage and wishfulness of the teacher..You can watch our digital work below..You can also reach may pair's Türkan's blog here.. see you on the next blog...bye..

                                 our digital story

                                                      ''  HOW TO MAKE SOAP  ''