First Experience of DS

DIGITAL STROYTELLING

       Digital storytelling is a tool for making creative and entertaining stories for educational purposes in that context. It enables to visualize the story in the minds of students, people, audiences etc. and to make the story accessible for learners regarding second language learning. Digital storytelling uses technology to explain an idea, a concept or a traditional story. Digital stories can be prepared in many forms and on the base of many programs. The stories can be in the form of slideshows, a podcast, a video, an animation or even some Power Point. It is extremely useful for teachers to enliven classroom and arouse more student participation and interest and it has serious areas of usage. Teachers who are shy, forgetful or bored with traditional presentations can taste the benefit of this technology without fearing to forget or being silly or incomprehensible for students. Students who are also bored with traditional narrative teacher style can like that kind of storytelling and be more active in those classes. It seems that the only handicap of storytelling is whether or not teacher has an access to various technological tools such as a personal computer, a microphone, a digital camera and some free software. Nevertheless when today’s modern classrooms are taken into consideration, it is possible to say that DS will be an everyday tool for an ordinary teacher one day hopefully.

            Me and my pair, two callow storytellers, had so much fun that we could hardly stop our laughters. We seriously cope with Moviemaker. Firstly, we write the script. Before writing, we thought about first topic then story. I mean we followed a topic-based way: our topic was place of prepositions. As we targeted kindergarten students, we had a small scale of them: in, on, under, between and behind. After choosing the story, it was an easy job to create the story:  It flashed in my mind suddenly. We took the photos of every scene after drawing the furnitures and sequenced them via Moviemaker. We added the voice recordings and music later. It is needless to say that we learned so much about the moviemaker and digital storytelling experiencing it in real way.

          Lastly, it was a really entertaining and educational experience for us. We learned something new in every step and we tried to push limits of creativity and this is true for all the tasks we had done since the beginning of the course actually.