EVO, Digitalstorytelling4kids and the tool of the week

I took a challenge this month. Yes, it’s EVO time and there are wonderful sessions for every teacher’s needs. As I’m a big fan of using digital tools in the classroom I decided to take the Digital Storytelling for Young Learners. The course is moderated by a dream team, Shelly Terrell, Esra Girgin, Barbara Sakamoto, Özge Karaoglu, Jennifer Verschoor, David Dodgson, Michelle Worgan, and Sabrina De Vita. I’m very busy with lots of so many things these days, but from the very first day I realised how correct my decision was to be at the course.

The course has three working spaces:

1. The wiki, for assigning tasks and tutorials.
2. Yahoo group for discussions
3. Posterous for showcasing participants’ digital stories.

As in all courses, the sessions started with greetings and introductions. The first task was very creative and the digital introductions were great. I learned new tools, saw how others used the ones that I love and use and saw how others used the ones that I didn’t like but seeing them convinced me to go back and try them again.

I discovered Google Search Stories via Esra Girgin’s introduction and I loved it very much.

It is very easy to use:

Just type in your searches and select the kind of results that is most suitable for your story. You add music and send it to YouTube to share it with the world.

I’m planning to use it

• To introduce a topic
• As a pre-reading and awareness raising activity before starting to read a short story or a novel

And also I will ask my students to use it

• To summarise the story they’ve read
• To introduce a topic

And I’m sure I’ll come up with something else later, but if you do please, tell me.

And you can watch my stories, the 1st one is a poem from our Comenius project reading list by the Nobel winner Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska

and an idea how to assign a writing task for my students