1 What is digital storytelling?
Digital storytelling is telling a story via digital technology that includes multimedia. Although you, as the teacher, might want to create a digital story as a model for your students, it’s far more fun – and supportive of language learning – for the students to create their own digital stories. They can do this individually, in pairs or in small groups. They can create their digital stories in the classroom or at home, depending on your, and their, access to the internet and to computers or mobile devices. Students of all ages can create digital stories, from those in primary and secondary school to university students and adults.
2 How do I start with digital storytelling?
The first step is to decide exactly what kind of story your students are going to tell. It might be a narrative story with characters. Or you may want them to create stories that give information about another student in the class, based on interviews that they first carry out in pairs. A story might describe a process (such as photosynthesis), or describe a historical event or a place. It might be in the form of a monologue or a dialogue. Whatever stories your students choose to tell, they should be tied to your syllabus, and relevant to whatever topic you are currently studying in class. Digital stories provide an excellent opportunity for students to review vocabulary and grammar that they have recently studied.
3 How do students create a digital story?
The next step is for the students to create a plot and/or a script for their story. This is where the real language work takes place, as the students draft and review the content for their stories. At this point, feedback from the teacher, or in the form of peer review of scripts, can help them to increase the complexity of the language they use, to write more and to work on accuracy. Allow your students to create at least two drafts of their stories. If they are going to record themselves narrating their stories, they will need plenty of time to rehearse, and to re-record their audio scripts as many times as they feel necessary. Because of this, audio-scripts are often best recorded at home by the students, once the written versions of their scripts are ready. Creating a digital story becomes an effective way for them to review and practise language in a creative and engaging way. Learning to use simple multimedia storytelling tools also helps students develop digital skills – these are skills that are useful beyond the classroom.
4 What tools are available to create digital stories?
Literally hundreds, and many of them are free. For example, some tools enable students to create cartoons: either static cartoon images accompanied by text, or animated cartoon images accompanied by text and/or audio. Particular favourites with teachers are Zimmer Twins, Storybird, Pixton, Xtranormal, Dvolver, Telegami and Voki. Other tools enable the students to add their own photos, and to add text and/or voice to these images in order to create multimedia slideshows. Fotobabble and Animoto are well-known examples of this kind of tool. For more digital storytelling tools, Alan Levine has an excellent site with 50+ tools for digital storytelling (http://50ways.wikispaces.com/), and you can see several of these tools in action at https://youtu.be/kDYJAZiskRw.
5 Can you give some examples of digital stories created by language students?
English language teachers have been getting their students to create digital stories for many years, so there are plenty of real examples out there. Here are some excellent examples of digital stories created by students in a range of free tools, and shared here with permission from their teachers:
- Vicky Saumell’s students used Zimmer Twins to create a simple summary of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: https://youtu.be/S8WJgxNF2Bk
- Michael Stout’s students at Toyo Gakuen University in Japan used Fotobabble to describe their favourite places: http://mrstoutsblog.blogspot.com.es/2010/06/toyo-gakuen- university-1-3a-writing_23.html
- Jennifer Verschoor and Mariana Lazzari’s primary school students wrote descriptions of animals with images in Google Slides: https://issuu.com/jenverschoor/docs/ebook_year_3.pptx
- Liliana Simon’s students used Storybird to create mystery stories: https://storybird.com/books/the-mistery-of-the-black-cat/ ?token=m3yzqyn9v3
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Now that you know how digital storytelling with free multimedia tools works, it’s your turn to try out some digital storytelling with your own students!
Nicky Hockly has been involved in EFL teaching and teacher training since 1987. She is Director of Pedagogy of The Consultants-E, an online teacher training and development consultancy. She maintains a blog at www.emoderationskills.com.
