Digital storytelling--Being new while being old

The definition of digital story is “A short, first person video-narrative created by combining recorded voice, still and moving images, and music or other sounds.” And digital storytelling is “the practice of combining narrative with digital content, including images, sound, and video, to create a short movie, typically with a strong emotional component.”

People use digital telling to teach culture, beliefs and values. It is a good way to let people that know a little technology make short videos so that they can exchange information and communicate with people far away. Also, according to 7 Things You Should Know About Digital Storytelling, this dynamic creates an opportunity to reflect on life and find deep connections with the subject matter of a course or with an out-of-class experience, such as a trip abroad. It’s a fresh way to combine technology with the nontechnology subjects together.

Photo by Bryan Alexander

As language teachers, I think we have many choices to adapt this digital storytelling into our language teaching. I watched several stories from Center for Digital Storytelling, and got inspirations from them.

We could make a video in English, or any second language we want to teach. We narrate our stories, and add language points we want to teach in those stories. For example, if we want to teach the past tense, we could narrate the story in past tense, and then asked the students to figure out how we use that tense. Or we could add the new vocabulary into our story, and let students guess the meaning and the usage of the new words. Although we are narrating the story in the second language, we still need to put subtitle in the students’ first language so that they have no trouble understanding the story. Keeping them in pace is important because once they start to get confused of the story, they will soon lose concentration.

Another way to use digital storytelling in our language teaching is that we can give the students the same pictures as materials for the video making, and then ask them to make up stories based on those pictures. Although the pictures are the same, apparently they will come up with different stories because they have different imaginations and experience. Also, the teacher can give them some extra requirements such as try to use certain sentence pattern in your storytelling, or try to use certain tense in your storytelling, etc. It’s a good way to help the students practice their speaking and writing skills.

In conclusion, although digital storytelling is not a brand new thing, we still need to explore it from language teaching aspect. It’s a simple and interesting way to combine technology and language teaching. I believe as long as we use it properly, both us teachers and students will benefit from it.

                                                             Photo by Seriykotik1970

Reference

7 Things You Should Know About Digital Storytelling

Center for Digital Storytelling.