Immigrants, refugees and Integration

Click on the link or the video below:

                                                              My reflection
General
The concept of making a story whether it is a digital or not is built on the structure of the story itself. We all know that traditionally the story should have a plot where the events are hooked to. In the modern concept of story making one can see how the form of a story has changed. In my digital story embedded within this blog, I tried to focus on a very important issue in the Canadian society in particular: the newcomers. There might not be a real plot in the real sense of the word but there is an implied one. The characters of the story are those who are involved in the process: those who run for their life.

Target readers
My target readers are my ELSA students. Some of these students came to Canada as a refugee and some of them came as immigrants. These students, especially the refugees, need to know and need to talk about their problems loudly to get help. The digital story functions as an incentive to them to know how to talk about their problem. Actually, the students can try to make their own digital stories based on the theme discussed in my digital story.

Why this topic?
At first my idea was to talk about my family. It is a common theme in the ELSA program in Canada. However, I decided to do something different not related directly to the ELSA curricular themes. Accordingly, I decided to build my digital story on the theme of immigrants and refugees. The story is short. Hence, it has to be concise and comprehensive at the same time. That is not easy but with the affordances of technology things can become smooth.

The method
I was a bit hesitant regarding the method I should use in making my digital story. There are a lot of software programs and most of these programs are free. This made my job easy. I didn’t use a lot of software in the digital story because it is too short to have a lot of modifications in it. So I decided to stick to two programs and youtube as a platform. The programs I used are Stupeflix and Windows movie maker. It took me a while to edit the audio file in it. There are a lot tricks when it comes to editing audio files. So it takes a bit of time to master this process.

My reaction
I love the task this week, I mean the digital story. I am grateful to John Egan for making it part of our assignments because I have come up with a great list of software programs and new ideas from my classmates. The great stories reflected in the blogs or in CONNECT were made with great efforts by professional educators ( you!). Generally , the assignment this week is really an eye opener in the field of digital story-making.
Thank you
Hussain