Robert McKee, a creative writing professor at the University of Southern California, once wrote, “Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.” In the field of language education, stories are valuable learning tools that help students to understand new possibilities of language use. Indeed, my own experience in creating a story was a journey in itself.
My attempt at creating a story was two-fold. I first created a comic strip in French about my family, which can be viewed this link or below. I used a program called Toondoo to create my comic due to its user-friendly features and visually-appealing design. It wasn’t until after I had created my comic that I realized it neglected to tell an actual story. While the activity can still serve as a reading activity with
the comprehension questions I posted, I still needed to create a story.
I instead decided to design my activity from a backwards design model based on defining the assessment and learning objectives prior to the actual activity. With my learning targets developed, I created a storyboard on paper about my experiences as a student in Quebec. As my story became clearer, I decided to search out a media design tool similar to PowerPoint that would allow me to display photos and text to create a reading comprehension activity based around my story. After an extensive search and a trial-and-error with different programs, I decided to use Scrapblog, which is a program that allows users to create a professional-looking, virtual scrapbook. I found the program easy-to-use, and I was able to embed reading comprehension questions on the actual scrapbook pages so that the student learning objectives could be met. Prior to finding this tool, I didn’t know that such programs existed and was impressed by the visual affordances of its features as I think it will greatly enhance student interest and motivation to do the reading activity. I would content that this tool had a definite impact on how my story was told since several photos could be uploaded onto one page, the scrapbook features create a strong visual impact, and the option of having a music clip provided yet another appealing addition. Below is my story:
My story is designed to be used as a partner activity in a language lab or as an individual homework assignment for students. Students can view the entire slide show or click slide by slide to ensure that they have read everything thoroughly and answered all the questions. Student responses can be handwritten and turn in or e-mailed to the professor. As an extension activity, students can create their own stories using this virtual scrapbook program and present them to the class. My middle school students would greatly enjoy this story media creation activity.
Overall, I found this story production project to be fun and rewarding. While the process itself was time consuming, I worked non-stop on the activity because it was hot only a hands-on learning activity for myself, but also one that I can actually use in my French class. Lastly, all the photos embedded in the slide show were my own, which I would argue adds appeal to my story and made copyright violations entirely a non-issue.
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