storytelling

Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation

Digital Storytelling for Younger & Older Learners

By Marisa Constantinides   Picture this: …a teacher holding up her laptop or tablet and a circle of children listening to her and following the digital images of her imagination, completely absorbed in the world she has been weaving for them through her narration.Now Picture this: The image is the same, it’s just the technology that changes, and books were new technology in the history of mankind, too, not so many centuries ago!

Storytelling & Language Acquisition

Much has been written about the importance of storytelling; bedtime stories form a part of our first contact with books, with language, as well as forge bonds between parent and child, storyteller and story listener, both engaging in a type of communication that goes beyond the narrative itself.

Very wisely, teachers of young learners, have been replicating this model of learning in young learner classrooms around the world.

Stories help children acquire…

… language
… values
… knowledge
… cultural identity
… cultural awareness

Stories help children develop…

… cognitive abilities
… oracy and literacy
… numeracy
… ability to concentrate
… auditory ability
… multiple intelligences
… critical thinking
… creative thinking

Moreover, all this is done naturally, in a way that appeals to the child echoing the process of L1 acquisition when stories and images play such a strong part in developing language skills.

Storytelling & Educational Objectives

Storytelling and story creation cover a wide spectrum of educational objectives. In the revised Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive domains, creating appears at the very top of Higher Order Thinking Skills and remembering – according to this taxonomy, appears as a Lower Order Thinking Skill. Even in Bloom’s own ordering. In the original  model creating did not feature but instead “Synthesis” was mentioned a higher order thinking skill which is very much an alternative way of describing creative thinking.

 

With the exception of ‘analyzing’, which is perhaps not suited to young learner classes, I would suggest that by using story telling activities which lead to storymaking by the learners,  you satisfy most of the educational objectives shown in Bloom’s taxonomy* – both lower and higher order cognitive domains.

Even if ‘remembering’  and ‘understanding’ are seen be at the lower order end of the cognitive abilities scale, they are equally important and vital in the process of learning anything; recalling language and concepts is a necessary building block for language acquisition.

By engaging your learners in digital storytelling activities you take care of more than just language forms; you also integrate the language skills in a most natural way.

  • Listening to stories can very naturally lead to story telling 
  • Reading stories can equally naturally lead to story writing 

Storytelling and making appeal to our affective domain as well – we connect with other fellow humans and to the collective human experience through storytelling

And, finally, by engaging your pupils in digital story telling activities, you are not only helping their language acquisition processes but also preparing them to be digitally literate and more successful 21st century learners .

Digital Storytelling & Adult Learners

We feel compelled to tell stories.

We tell each other stories every day of our lives, stories meant to help us connect, stories that echo our friends’ stories which makes us feel closer to them, stories that amuse or stories we invent – literary would exist without this strong human need.

Stories are a major part of how we communicate and how we teach – often, they are more powerful than direct instruction. They seem to reach parts that lecturing or direct instruction often are unable to!

Narrating & Adult Communication

Whether learning English on a general purpose course or on a specialist language focus programme, narration is an important part of developing fluency.

Personal narratives or anecdotes can motivate adults to produce long turns, to sustain talk for longer than the disjointed fragments of question and answer conversations common to a language lesson.

  • They can be rehearsed and satisfy the adult learner’s need for meaningful and motivating controlled practice
  • They provide more concrete evidence of progress to the teacher (and the learner herself/himself)
  • They are great for homework which can be recorded digitally in some way – adults are more likely to be motivated by this time of homework assignment.
  • They can build the basis for great presentation skills, which seems to be a skill more and more in demand in a world of online conferences, google hangouts, product presentations and online tutorials uploaded on you tube.
  • They can form the basis of good report writing
  • They can help the adult user establish and maintain better personal and business relationships with other L2 users.

Stories help adults with …

… language
… cultural awareness
… social awareness
… motivation
… oral & written fluency

Stories help adults develop…

… confidence
… social relationships
… ability to sustain talk or writing
… ability to concentrate
… auditory ability
… multiple intelligences
… critical thinking
… creative thinking

Some tools for digital narration

There are too many tools to include in just one post. Digital narration/storytelling is truly worth exploring and to that end I have included some great links for further exploration at the end of this post.

Example 1 – with Voicethread

In this Voicethread, the image  serves as a prompt for prediction. The learners record their version of the story before they hear the teacher narrate what actually happened

The image/prompt is a Word Cloud, another great tool which can lead to  written or oral narration. The students study the phrases, attempt connections, create episodes and sequences before they embark on their own story.

 

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Comment:  The students could equally well be asked to write their own version before they hear or read the original story; thus the prompts can lead to speaking, writing or both

Example 2 – with Creaza

A story animation created with this tool to show how you can use familiar themes with a twist to get adults to narrate. The story of Little Red Riding Hood has been used as an example as it was rewritten by American humorist James Thurber in 1932

N.B. The original version can be used with younger learners (though that one is pretty scary too :-) )

 

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You can find more ideas on how to use this type of animation – or similar ones that you can create with Xtranormal, GoAnimate or other similar tool, by reading a previous blog post of mine on Animating  Stories. 

In my original post, I used Jing – a free screencast tool – to capture  the story animation and to record my voice narrating it, something which the students can be shown how to do.

Postscript

The ‘digital’ aspect of storytelling is not a must to make a storytelling lesson a great success, although some of the tools – if available – will create an enhanced experience for younger and older learners alike, and may motivate further.

Read all of our posts about EdTech and Innovation by clicking here. 

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Marisa Constantinides runs CELT Athens, a Teacher Development centre based in the capital of Greece, and is a Course Supervisor for all courses, including the DELTA Cambridge/RSA Diploma, the Institute of Linguists Diploma in Translation and off-site seminars and workshops on a variety of topics.

This post originally appeared on the blog TEFL Matters and was republished with permission.

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Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation

Schools Should Shout Their Success Stories from the Rooftops

 

Consumer and social media are adept at sharing negative news about education. Here’s how administrators and teachers can get the good news out there, too.

A guest post by Christopher Piehler

When it comes to covering K-12 education, the consumer media does a fantastic job of telling the bad news. I understand why this is the case: Publications need to make money, and headlines like “FBI Seizes LAUSD Records Related to Troubled iPad Program” will always grab more readers’ eyeballs than, say, “Class Full of Happy Students Learns to Multiply.” But if you judged the success of this country’s public schools only by looking at “above the fold” articles in major newspapers and magazines, you would believe that K-12 education is nothing but one crisis after another. And from talking to educators and administrators around the country, I know that this is not true.

There is good news coming out of America’s classrooms every day. The challenge for schools and districts is to make their positive voices heard above the negative noise coming from consumer (and social) media. How can they do this? Here are four tips.

Know Your Story

Educational leaders need to shout their success stories from the rooftops, but before you speak up, you need to be clear about what your story is.

For example, through one of our clients I recently met Dr. Genevra Walters, the superintendent of Kankakee School District in Illinois, whose motto is “The transition to adulthood starts in preschool.” Dr. Walters backs this up by having each general ed grade in K-8 focus on a different career. So Kankakee’s story is clear: “We are the district that does everything we can to find the right career for our students, starting when they are five or six years old.”

Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that Dr. Walters herself is a graduate of Kankakee schools who rose to become superintendent of the district.

Have a Hook

Like I said before, “Class Full of Happy Students Learns to Multiply” is a nice story, but a tough sell for the media. To get your good news published, you need a hook—some aspect of the story that will grab editors’ and readers’ attention and keep them reading. In Kankakee’s case, there are two potential hooks. The first one is that the district starts career education when kids are so young. It’s unusual and unexpected, and it makes readers want to find out how the district does it.

The second hook is Dr. Walters herself, a classic “local girl made good.” Which brings me to another important point about storytelling for schools: People are better than programs. Yes, it’s amazing that your district has a teacher who is helping three- and four-year olds build a Mars rover, but who is that teacher? A former astronaut? A former “bad kid” who found his calling in the classroom? The “human interest” story is a cliché because it’s true. Humans are interested in other humans.

Connect Your Story to a Larger Narrative

Another great way to get positive attention from the media is to connect your school’s story to a larger national or international narrative. Right now, for example, the story of a Syrian refugee child who comes to a new school and teaches her classmates about Syrian culture would be a big hit. And it’s not just one-time events that you can connect with. Editors are always looking for stories that tie in with recurring events like presidential elections, the Olympics, or even the Super Bowl.

Tell Your Story Every Day

In today’s connected world, getting articles published in newspapers or magazines is only a part of telling your story. Whether you like it or not, part of your story is being told on social media every day, by students, parents, and pundits, all of whom have their own agenda. And though the temptation to respond to critics can be strong, I think we can all agree that engaging in a shouting match in the echo chamber of the Internet is worse than useless.

Instead, I suggest following the lead of Tom Murray, the State and District Digital Learning Policy and Advocacy Director at the Alliance for Excellent Education. In his former job as director of technology and cyber education in the Quakertown Community School District, Murray was in a meeting with 30 administrators who he wanted to enlist in telling the school’s story through Twitter. “Our goal,” he said, “became to highlight one great thing a teacher was doing and one great thing a student was doing each day, taking no more than five minutes.”

Two Tweets times 30 administrators times five days equaled 300 positive stories coming out of the district every week. Seeing how easy it was, teachers joined in, highlighting their successes on the district’s hashtag. With a little initiative and diligent follow-through, the Quakertown community collaborated to tell its story—one Tweet at a time.

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Christopher Piehler is the Lead Storyteller at PR with Panache! The former editor-in-chief of THE Journal, he has worked for a variety of consumer and B2B publications. He has been an ed tech commentator on both TV and radio, has served as a CODiE award judge, and has been a speaker at the FETC and CoSN conferences.

This is the first part of a two-part article. Part two will cover how schools can use local, national, and education-focused publications to tell their stories to a variety of audiences.

Read all of our posts about EdTech and Innovation by clicking here. 

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