Damascus.. The capital of history.
This is the title of my digital story. Enjoy watching it and send me your comments about it..
Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate for Schools.
Hope you enjoyed watching the introduction. To visit the places where the students went, check this interactive map.
Damascus. The Capital of History,
This is the title of my Digital story. I wanted to create a story that relates to my Moodle course and introduce my country to my colleagues. Damascus was one of the most important archaeological sites in the world, but toward the bad conditions, no one is visiting it anymore.
The events of this story happened with me and my friends when we were in the 8th grade (15 years ago). The story reflects this event with some changes due the development of technology.
Stories play a great role in education for both kids and teenagers. Storytelling fits well within a constructivist framework , whereby students make sense of interactions based on their own past experiences and can generate stories as a means of assisting with the process of reflecting upon these interactions
Rather than simply asking students to reflect upon a particular issue, the use of storytelling provides a recognizable framework to assist students in the process of reflection and to relate their thoughts to other experiences that they may have had. (Jenkins, 2009)
For creating my story, I visited: http://50ways.wikispaces.com web site and started thinking about the choices one by one, and in my mind is this quote: “The technology and software required to create a digital story should be low cost (or no cost), easy to access, learn and use. The use of technology allows the story to be captured and disseminated to a wider audience.”(Jenkins, 2009). Moreover,” Although the emphasis has to be on the story, the application of technology to storytelling is an important development of this technique. The availability of easy to- use software for combining images and narrative means that anyone can create a professional-looking product with a minimum amount of equipment and technical knowledge. The benefit of the technology is that it provides a ‘portable’ product that can easily be distributed and disseminated to a wider audience. It is the addition of images to the narrative” (Jenkins, 2009,257)
At first, I thought about using Prezi because it allows you to present your ideas clearly in an attractive way. Then I wanted the students to know the locations of the story events, so I read about Mapskip, Mapwing, Google Maps and I decided to use Google Maps. I chose Google Maps because I found it very reliable, up to date and it has many features that can enrich my story. I marked the places I wanted and drew the trip’s road and added some texts and photos to the places that I have marked.
After that, I wanted to create an interesting introduction to my Map, so I thought about Goanimate4schools.com . It’s really a very nice website and I encourage anyone who likes to create a cartoon video to use it. I used a demo account to create my video. There were several options in choosing the scene, characters, voices, feelings, and so on. You could add up to 20 lines in the story and each line was limited by 180 characters. Jenkins (2009), mentioned in his research that “A ‘typical’ digital story will be created by a single author, will last for two to three minutes and will consist of no more than 15 still images with a narrative of 250 to 300 words”
My story is near of that. This is my first “late” try in creating a digital story but it was a really interesting experience. When a story is used to inform, to teach about something not already known or understood by the listener, then it becomes a way of demonstrating what has been learned by the storyteller. Thus, digital storytelling can be a medium for learning by teaching. This connects directly with the pedagogy of learner-created knowledge (Jenkins,2009,)
Finally, my story will deliver some of the information that is included in my Moodle course in a creative way, and move my students from the virtual world to the real world.
References:
Gravestock, Phil. Jenkins, Martin. Transforming higher education through technology-enhanced learning. 2009. Retrieved from: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/learningandtech/Transforming-18.pdf