TECHNOLOGY IS UNITED WITH STORIES !

Source of the picture

Hello everyone !

It is always nice to listen to stories regardless of the topic. Thanks to the advanced technology, it is possible to listen and watch stories on your computer or any other mobile devices via internet. Of course, this development can be used in education, too.

In this week’s project, we were assigned to create a digital story in pairs. My partner is Ecem which is not a surprise. We were given three options to choose the topic of the digital story and we chose telling about being good friends.

We did not have many problems creating the story because when you are good friends in reality, writing from experience makes things easier. However, we had time limitation for the stories so writing something two-minutes long at most restricted us a little bit. We were supposed to use photos so we used our own photos and also, this part was easy as Ecem and I have lots of photos together.  We picked four insrumental songs accordingly to the parts of the story. Also, we recorded the story and this was not hard to do as we had experience from our podcasting project. I can say that it was neither too easy nor too difficult thus far.

On the other hand, combining all of the materials to create the story was the difficult part. We used Windows Movie Maker for this step. Even though it was not something new to us, because we had lessons on how to use it in the first year of the college, recalling the already-existing knowledge took some time. Adjusting our recorded voices and the duration of photos and also adding music to them was difficult to achieve in the beginning. Also, we had dificulties when adjusting our recorded voices and music so that the music would not be louder than our voices.

Of course, it would be harder to overcome these difficulties without a partner. Having an another opinion on writing the story, preparing the materials and overcoming the difficulties makes everything two times easier and less exhausting. The outcome is checked two times from two different points of view and this makes whole project result in a more convenient way. Collaborative working definitely is a plus in the preparation of such projects.

So, how digital storytelling can be adapted to education ?

Students can create their own stories, using the topics given by the teacher. These topics could be related to the one that we created. They can create stories that inform or instruct. They can create fictional stories which draw the attention of all learners, especially of young learners. Of course, before giving them this assignments, you must show them some examples accordingly to the each category that you will give them to create their stories. Since visuals and sounds are combined in digital storytelling, students will be more interested when creating their owns and watching other stories which will eventually result in a development in their foreign language learning. Also, creating something that is truly theirs always will be enjoyable and promotive for their learning process. Just do no forget to give them some time for this task, it cannot be completed in two days !

There is always a way for a better learning environment as long as you seek for it, I'll see you in my next post !

Here is our digital story :