AN EDGE OF TEACHING AND LEARNING: DIGITAL STORYTELLING

Hi everybody!

I am very excited writing this post because I have done an enjoyable, impressive and purposeful task this week, with my friend, and I want to share it with you immediately: it is "digital storytelling."
Have you heard about digital storytelling? If you haven't then you probably guess how it means or how it is used. I will explain anyway. Digital storytelling is integrating sounds, images, videos and creating a short narrative story. You can create your own story; it can be a personal story, historical events or a special topic. After you finish, you can share it.  How amazing it is! Technology definitely develops without stopping.

For our task we have to work collaboratively and I have worked with Kader. Our teacher asked us to choose one option from three options. We chose the third option, creating a fictional story. Actually I was lucky because Kader has good paintings so she drew the pictures and I wrote the story that we narrate. Then, we recorded our voices and finally shot the story with a camera and created it. We used Movie Maker to arrange the whole materials. We had no difficulty in either creating the story or drawing the pictures, but while recording our voices and filming the story we tried a lot. As it was important to be able to give the emotions to our target audience, lower intermediate students, we tried again and again while recording our voices. Moreover, we used sticks to move our two characters and controlling them was a little bit difficult for us because at the same time we had to shoot it with the camera. At the end we were surprised with the outcome after we created our digital storytelling. According to us, it was perfect; our narration, the sequence of visuals, movement of the characters, the background music... They were all in harmony. To see the outcome which we did own made us happy.

If you are now interested in using digital storytelling in your lessons as a teacher it can serve a lot of affordance to you because children fancy the technology today. You can create your own digital storytelling and use it in the classroom to make the learning permanent. Furthermore, you can ask your students to prepare their own digital storytelling. Even you may cooperate with your students and other teachers to make well-designed digital storytelling. Both you and your students will enjoy this process and it will improve their language skills; writing, speaking and listening. As the day goes on new teaching materials come out and we should know these materials because teaching and learning are rough processes and in these processes we should make teaching and learning fun but at the same time efficient and permanent. Digital storytelling is one of the most important material I will use in my classroom easily. So, I recommend you to use it. Remember the importance of technology in teaching and learning process and apply the technology in your lessons.
Here is our digital storytelling, strongly advised to watch! See you soon.