Digital Storytelling in the WL Classroom
/“Tell me a fact and I’ll learn. Tell me a truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.” ~ Indian Proverb
Storytelling has been a major component of my World Language classroom for many years. New vocabulary and grammatical structures are embedded into stories co-created by myself and the class. Students are the actors: a king, a talking tortilla, an octopus or possibly Shakira. Stories are an effective vehicle for providing compelling, repetitive and personal comprehensible input. Because language is acquired through comprehensible input, I have found storytelling effective for both helping students acquire high levels of Spanish as well as creating a close-knit community of risk-taking language learners.
I have used the traditional paper/pencil/crayon storyboards for years. Quick and easy for assessing Listening Comprehension (Interpretive Mode) and practicing retells (Presentational Mood) but many kids (often the older ones) find drawing difficult.
Digital storytelling is incredibly more powerful in terms of building language proficiency. Digital tools today enable my students to capture our class stories, create their own and easily share them with a wider audience on my website or their blog. The ability to easily work with audio, text, images and now video is amazing!
Here are a few examples of students creating digital stories.
iMovie (above)
Course Three inspired me to create a digital story(with iMovie) based on our most current class story. Kim was correct in stating the amount of time required to make an actual video. Embarrassingly, it took me about 10 hours to complete mine and it is no masterpiece. I created it primarily on the plane with no wifi and wanted to experiment with the different features. I'm grateful otherwise I’m sure I would have spent double the time looking for images of Juanes and music from Marc Anthony. I tried, instead, to focus on providing repetitive language and asking a few simple questions to prompt students while viewing.
My only caution, as a language teacher, in using Digital Storytelling is the potential amount of time spent (in class) creating digital stories. Although most tools are quite easy, there still is a learning curve and I find my students move back to English when learning how to use the tool or program. I'm trying to teach language such as What do I do next? or How did you do that? to mitigate them moving into English. Also, students and teachers can spend too much time looking for the perfect background, color or image. I say too much time only because class time is limited and searching for the perfect color of blue will not increase a student's proficiency in the language. That being said, giving time lines to finish stories and encouraging out-of-class creation are two strategies that have worked for me.
Limiting the tools you teach students is alright, too. There are so many options to create digital stories. New tweets everyday, with long lists, appear in my stream. It is not always about having lots of different tools to tell your story but having a few that work well for you and your class. That way, you are spending more time leveraging the power of the tool, rather than learning a new one. Sometimes I send kids home with a list of choices and they report back as to the best ones. Ideally, I'd love it if my students came in to my class already having had practice with a fews tools, as they do with a pencil or pen.
Please share examples of digital storytelling in your language classes. I'd love to see them.
Comments (8)
Well done, you! So glad you explored with a new tool and gave all the features a try! It is amazing how much you can do, and how long it can take to get to know all the different features. It seems like students create works like this so quickly, but once you give it a try yourself, you realize just how long it takes.
Yes, I'm going to post the treasure hunt "game" eventually, likely on my final Course 5 blog post.Interestingly, the majority of the planning for the game was done very low-tech: I just sketched the whole branching flow chart out in pencil on a big piece of scrap paper -- much easier to keep track of the flow of choices than by making something online (at least for me). Once I was ready to create it digitally, I ended up using a program that I had not anticipated, PowerPoint. Actually Adrian Camm had us use a very old program developed at MIT 30+ years ago. It gave us an appreciation for how you have to plan spacially when having people make choices and move around in a virtual world. But it was far, far too slow in terms of creation. I had not known about the "action buttons" in PowerPoint: you can insert buttons anywhere and indicate which slide # to move the player to when they press them. So my kids made their choices during the Treasure Hunt and ended up either at the correct next stage or at some frightening/funny/odd "fail" page, with a suggestion of how to correctly alter their journey. Mostly, it was a success, but I've got to rethink aspects of it that were bottlenecks -- areas where the game slowed down too much and occasionally had children standing around waiting to interact with me. Good stuff -- never thought I'd be back on the much despised PowerPoint!
Dear Leslie, I enjoyed reading through a few of your blogs on my phone as I waited for the school bus this morning. I approve of your method of using storytelling in second language teaching. I used to run a film and drama after-school club here for years; almost all of our students are English as a Foreign Language (Osaka, Japan - mostly Japanese and Korean kids). So the pains you described learning iMovie are long passed for me; the benefits you and your students will reap from iMovie will be well worth those initial struggles. I agree with you about 2 minutes as a good target for a video - for any purpose, but for job interviews for sure. It is sometimes a hard target to hit, but worth the effort.
Leslie, I read your blog with much interest. Always interesting to see how other teachers use some of the tools I use in a different way.As an PYP & MYP art teacher (and COETAIL course 5 student), it's great to see how others use art in their classrooms (love that storyboard image you posted!). But as I also know all too well that drawing (and art in general for some) is a big challenge for some students, technology has proved to be a help in various ways. I used the idea of digital storytelling in my class, although not to tell stories. After a workshop with Adrian Camm I decided to use the 'digitally interactive' approach as a way to introduce a new unit on graphic design. As I'd had some difficulty previously in conveying the principles of Contrast, Unity, and Balance, I decided to create an interactive "treasure hunt" in which the students (working in pairs) would journey through a series of pages -- with information, images, and tasks to complete -- which would challenge them at various stages to make choices (i.e. to show their comprehension) in order to move on to the next stage. Though there were many lessons learned by me in terms of how to streamline the process for next year's Grade 4 students, overall it proved to be a far more engaging and successful method of giving the students a foundation in visual presentation principles. I plan to use this approach in other classes as my unit provocation in the future. It's definitely been one of the best things about COETAIL for me.
Wow, Aaron! Your "treasure hunt" sounds amazing. I'd love to take it myself and your approach would work for me. Maybe we could have it added as a resource to Course 3.
Hola Leslie, What a great idea of getting the inside info on the food weaknesses of the tech people. Will use that friendly strategy. A big thank you for your advice and suggestions. Will keep Storybird in mind for another project. Hope we can collaborate in the future.
Lucie
Hello Leslie, I read your post with great interest. I am new to WL (french) teaching and I am always looking for new an innovative ways to move ahead, but without completly eradicating paper and pencil. I love this idea of digital story telling and have experienced it with my advance french class. We read a story with a cliff hanger ending and they had to imagine the rest through digital story telling. We used Voice thread and I agree with what you are saying. We spent way to much time working out the kinks than actually working on the story and the language. My knowledge of tech is somewhat at the beginning of the learning curve, so it is often difficult to help my students. Thank God for the tech team at school.
Bonsoir Lucie Jean, I'm sure your kids enjoyed creating an end to you cliffhanger. I love VT but it is time consuming and the fun (for me) is in the collaboration of lots of voices interacting all on one slide. Here's an example of a language VT on food. https://voicethread.com/share/571211/ You can, of course, add the comments to students' digital stories. It's just another step. Often worth it, though, if you've done the work to get everyone using the program.
It's also fun to quickly draw out a story and then take pictures of each section, upload, and add text or audio. Less time and less complicated but still allows for creativity. Another tool I love for more advanced students is Storybird because students don't draw but just pick artists' amazing images and write based on those images.
If you want, I can share your French stories w/ our French teacher. She may be able to get her kids to comment/interact w/ your students. I can always ask.
And lastly, I know the favorite soda/snack of my tech guy. Couldn't live w/ out him.
Thanks for commenting.