MY STORY
Click here to watch my story. Sorry about the logo, it was a trial download.
Why was this the right tool for me to tell my story?
To be perfectly honest, I was lost as to what to do. “Tell a story! I thought. In my head I had plenty of ideas; the problem was materializing them with my poor knowledge of any creative tools. Then, on top of that, how I would I use it in class!! After much delivering, I finally got an idea: show my students the difference between third person omniscient and third person limited, using images and even cool sound effects to create a narrative. As I was not going to have time to learn how to use something flashy, i.e. ‘Flash’, I decided to work using Power Point. All was going well until I had to try and download the so called free sound tracks. Impossible! By five in the morning I gave up and went to bed.
The next day, I decided to concentrate on ETEC532. We had been asked to create a visual representation of what we had learned in the course; before I knew it, I was creating the story for the wrong course! The knowledge, tools and resources I had learned about in ETEC 565, were helping me create a detailed visual narrative of my learning process in ETEC532. I began to get excited with all the images, and realized this was the story I wanted to tell for ETEC 565; I could always come up with another visual representation for ETEC 532 later.
How did I select my tool?
Well, this is the tool I feel more comfortable with. Perhaps with more time I could have used others, like a video camera, but for now I could not afford to experiment. This I think is a major problem with technology, finding the time to experiment. In this sense, ETEC565 has been very useful, because the assignments force us to learn how to use new tools. For example, for my story, I discovered the new social media sites with free images, and I played around like never before with Power Point. However, as to which is the right tool to use, though it depends on the objective, one also has to be practical.
How would a story – telling approach would work with a course that I teach, or may teach in the future?
There are many reasons. For example, there are things that are better explained visually, in the case of literature, I have used visual examples, though not all my own, to explain such things as: satire; symbolism; examples in movies of foreshadowing; the difference between third person limited and omniscient; different plot types; characterization and more. Literature is about telling stories, so what better way to teach it, than with more stories. However, stories can effectively be told in many ways, which is why I have used other mediums that narrate events, e.g. paintings, songs, pictures to name a few.
Pedagogically speaking, by using a story telling approach, be it visual or heard, we are catering for other styles of learning, or ‘intelligences’, as Gardner (1993) would put it. Research has also been carried out on the different regions of the brain that are stimulated when we use our five senses, and story-telling can entail several of these, depending on which tools are used to create it. If in addition it is students who create these stories all the better; not only will we cater for different intelligences, they will practice active learning, and also practice collaborative learning and social skills that develop emotional intelligence. In my particular case, the making of my reflection on my learning process in ETEC532 was very productive, and I enjoyed using visual images rather than words to describe what was seen; a bit like Buzan’s mental maps, only this one was not on a single page. By forcing myself to use images and very few words, was a great way to truly have to understand concepts in order to be able to portray them with images.
References
Atkins, M., & Blissett, G. (1992). “Interactive video and cognitive problem-solving skills”. Educational Technology, January 32 (1), 44-50.
Buzan, T.(1993). El libro de los MAPAS MENTALES. Barcelona: URANO.
Gardner, H. (1993).Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. USA Basic Books,2nd ed. (first 1983), USA
Silberman, M. L. (1996). Active learning: 101 strategies to teach any subject. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Strother, J.B and A.I. Randall (n.d). “Addressing Learner Variables in an e-Learning Environment”. Retrieved from http://www.editlib.org/p/12262 23/06/09