Digital Storytelling Project: The Cactus

Hellooo! Today's topic is digital story telling. Our task is to tell a story or do a tutorial with our narration. İn our 3 minutes long video, Betül and i tried to show you how to grow a cactus in a fun way.

Was it hard? 

Ofcourse, not every bit of preparing this video was fun. We had some difficulties. We initially wanted to prepare the video on Powtoon. But little did we know! The website was very slow and kind of hard to use. So we gave up and used Camtasia instead.

Follow us step by step: 

First we found some cute cactus pictures on the internet. İ took photos of my own cactus too :') We searched for some info and used mostly Wikihow for that. We wrote down our text and recorded our voices. We -actually i- had many difficulties in this part. İt was so hard to get the perfect record. The moment i thought i got it, then we had difficulties with the computer blah blah. Anyways, we edited the photos and wrote something on them using photoshop, put them in order, at last we completed our video.

The only thing we could do with Powtoon actually.

Working together with Betül was quite fun. We thought of many ideas, couldnt decide in one at first but when we did it was so easy to continue. We could understand what eachother meant very quickly. İm glad that i had her because if i didnt, my video woulnt probably be this well prepared since my computer is broken and im left with a tablet, so... yeah. You can imagine the struggle, right? And i think i helped her with wording her opinions too. So we are mutually glad i guess? ._.

İs it useful to give students such tasks? 

İ think this digital storytelling activity will be very helpful in ELT. Telling your own story, with your own photos and words is kind of special in my opinion.  And the children of this generation love spending time with their electronic devices, so it must not be a burden to them.

İ enjoyed this activity a little more than the other ones i have done so far to be honest.

Click here to watch our video! 

Cat in a box, words on a map

Oh, hey! Didnt see you there.

Just kidding. What a surprise. Anyways. Now i am going to tell you about something i didnt do. My friends' presentation.

When we were doing our presentations, one caught my attention. İt is presented by my dear friends Sinem & Nilgün. Dont forget to check their blogs out, they are uh-mazing.

Enough talking, lets get right into it.

The website is wordle.net. İt lets you create your own word maps.

 

How does it work? 

You can just click the 'create' button and paste your text that you want to work on. Then it chooses the words that are most repeated and puts them on the word map.

You can just list the words that you want to appear.

You can personalize your word map, choosing the themes, the font types and such.

This is the word map made by Sinem & Nilgün

How can we use this in our classrooms?   

We can make word lists and posters so they can learn words that are releated to eachother.

We can just create games etc.

Here is a word map full of adjectives:

Not a day goes by without learning something new, does it? See you on my next post!

We've got tales to tell

Hello there children! (Please read this again with Chef's voice, thank you)

Today i am  going to introduce you a website called LittleBirdTales.com about which i and my partner Betül did a presentation earlier in the classroom. This website lets you create your own digital story or storybook (if you want it printed) by drawing, reading, writing and uploading pictures.

Lets see how one is created.

Step 1 

This is the frst thing you see when you open the website. Go to the 'create a tale' page.

Step 2 

Create a cover page. You can give your tale a name and write your name in these two boxes which are placed in the upper part of the screen.

Step 3 

As you can see the mindset is pretty similar to Paint. You can use the brushes the shapes eraser and such. For audio you can record your voice. When you save the first page, it directs you to the next page. 

Step 4

This is where your story begins. You can draw again or upload pictures. You can write your story in the box placed on the bottom right of the page and, again, record it. You can repeat this process as your story goes on.

Step 5

You can save and preview everything you did. Now you are done!

You can go to 'my tales' page and see all of your tales there. You can edit them whenever you want. You can also share them with your friends your teacher your students etc.

There is a 'public tales' section which includes tales made by different people. And another section which is full of classes that are already prepared to inspire and guide people about their tales. They are separated by languages and grades.

For what purposes can we use LittleBirdTales.com?

• Since you can do tutorials with this website, you can make your students do some easy tutorials or just maybe want them to tell about their last summer vacation.

• They can tell their daily lives.

• They can create their own tale OR work in groups. Here is an idea: divide the class by three groups. First group will create characters, a setting, places and such. Second group will create a complicated problem using these. Third group will find a solution to the problem and finish the story.

• İmagine that you give your students an unfinished story as a handout, you may want your students to finish that story however they want and illustrate it on littlebirdtales.com. As there is not really an age limit, any child (as long as they know what the buttons mean) can use this website for various reasons.

İ find this website very useful and entertaining. İf you have any suggestions about what purposes we can use it, please let me know :)

Now i am going to continue studying for my finals. See you.

Before you leave, check out our video we made during our presentation. A masterpiece indeed.

• Click to view my tale.
•