Hello my fellow friends!
Do you listen to your grandpa enthusiastically when he starts telling you all his youth stories or you pretend to like it while counting the minutes? If your answer is yes to the first question, congratulations you’re an amazing listener. Don’t forget to thank your grandfathers for their interesting, creative storytelling skill.
Storytelling is a creative way to breath life into written works and the good news is grandpas ARE NOT the only ones who can tell amazing stories. Students and teachers can tell a lot of creative stories in ESL/EFL classrooms.
Why should we use storytelling?
The answer is simple. Storytelling,in fact is quite popular. So many youtubers have storytelling videos and “Draw My life” was actually a digital storytelling trend. Moreover, learners can tell their original stories and share this in a very vivid, fun way with their peers. Storytelling will let them improve not only their writing skills but also their pronunciation as well. They will develop their speaking abilities and will be able to talk freely.
Why Digital though?
Back to grandpas. Some of us enjoy listening to their stories but unfortunately some of us lose interest listening to them. Have you ever asked yourself “why”? Is it because of their old age? NO! The reason is, we find it boring. Not the stories. The way of telling. We don’t want our students to get bored while telling stories so teachers and students should make these stories as attractive, as effective as possible by providing audios, videos, images, posters etc. related to them. They can even draw or make animations! They can use various tools to make their stories digital from online tools to movie making programs.
Our Digital Storytelling Experience
My friend Murat and I tried digital storytelling for our course to experience it and show you how you ,as teachers or students, or grandparents 🙂 can use digital storytelling. We’ve talked about our friendship, we made a video with our photos as slides. We used “iMovie” to make our video but you can find many alternatives for yourself and students. It was nice to tell our story of friendship and how we perceive friendship. Digital storytelling is actually something quite powerful if you can carry your message in an effective way. You can watch our video here and check out Murat’s blog as well. We’ll appreciate it.I hope you like it!
Thanks
K.
A linguaphile's notes 