Digital Story

The digital story assignment was a huge challenge for me, and one which took me a long time to even get down to. I wasn’t as worried about which tools I would use as what story to tell. Should I tell a funny story? A true one? A fictional one? Should I tell my own story and make an introduction of myself for my students?

 

In the end, I decided I would tell a story to teach an idea – something like one of those fairy tales with a moral at the end. I chose to create a story about two fictional characters who are ESL learners. They each have a different approach, and one of them works better than the other.

 

I’m always struggling to get my students to speak up in class. I encourage them to try, and always remind them that failure is just part of learning and not to be scared of it. So my story tries to illustrate that idea – that learning by practicing, by failing, and by studying language in an authentic way will put them at an advantage, and that it will help them in the long run. My students are GREAT at memorizing vocabulary, and probably know more about grammar than I do to be honest, but most of them can’t speak more than a few words if their lives depended on it!

 

To tell my story, I used 3 different tools together – Jing (screen capture), Toondoo (comics/illustrations), and Animoto (super awesome slideshow program).

It took me a while to select these tools. I knew right away that I wanted to utilize Animoto – it’s fun, dynamic, and looks very professional. But I wasn’t sure how to use it to tell my story, because I didn’t have images for it. I eventually decided that I would use Toondoo to create my images, characters, and scenes, and Jing to capture them and transfer them into Animoto.

I began by typing out my story in short sentences in a text document, to get an idea of what I would need to illustrate. Once I had my storyline, I went into Toondoo to figure out how to create the images I would need to tell my story. I considered just making the story a comic strip, but it would have been about 25 panels long, and I thought that the dynamic movement of an Animoto slideshow would be a more interesting way to flip through the images than if they were static.

 

I started a 3-panel cartoon in Toondoo, and made a few different environments for my characters to tell their story in. From there I could add props, other characters, change their expressions and positions (but only somewhat), and create my images. Once I had an image I liked, I could add text if I wanted, and then use Jing to save the image. When I had all my images done, I went over to Animoto. Since my video was going to be more than 30 seconds (obviously), I went ahead and bit the bullet to pay for an upgraded membership. I think Animoto is a great tool for presentation, and I expect to use it much more in the future, so I think it will be worth it. Plus, why not support a great tool?

 

In Animoto, I loaded all my images and then arranged them in the order of my story. When I went to add text, I was surprised by how limited the function was. You can only add up to 30 characters per text block, which is quite restrictive, so I needed to edit my story considerably to fit it into short little snippets of language. Too bad.

 

Once I was finished with that, I needed to add music. I selected a track I liked, and that I thought fit with the story I was telling, but after my movie was finished, I found that because the track was only 1:45 long, that it had simply cut off the rest of the images and text in the story, rather than looping the track. I went back and found a longer track, and although I’m not crazy about the music, it’s the right length and gets the job done. I opted not to upload my own MP3 because of the proprietary/copyright issues involved.

 

In the future, I might prefer to use a program like Camtasia studio to create the finished product, at least for something with as much text as this story has. I love the visual appeal of Animoto as a storytelling tool, but it has some limitations as well. The limited text space forced me to alter my original story somewhat, and the inability for the user to adequately control the timing, either of the full length of the video or of the individual slides is problematic, because most stories need some changes in pace to be told well.

 

Overall however, I’m really pleased with how my production turned out! Storytelling is a fun way to teach, because it’s relatable. It helps the listener/viewer to engage with the ideas by seeing a different point of view or by imagining themselves in the same situation. I think this story will be fun for my students, and I can use it to introduce the topic of accuracy versus fluency when it comes to second language learning. I hope everyone else enjoys it too!