Group items tagged

Here's my blurb: This website, hosted by the University of Houston, explores the educational uses of digital storytelling. The site contains practical information regarding different digital storytelling programs, and provides "how to" activities for writing scripts, designing storyboards, and recording audio. There is also lesson planning information, copyright information, and a discussion of rubrics for assessment and evaluation. Here's there blurb: About this Site The Goals of this Website The primary goal of the Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling website is to serve as a useful resource for educators and students who are interested in how digital storytelling can be integrated into a variety of educational activities.

If you do a digital storytelling project with your students, the Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling site linked to a contest for K-12 students to submit their stories and win cool awards such as iPods and has contests for the best stories, and your students could potentially win awards, such as iPod Minis and iPod Nanos, and scholarships up to $8000. Pretty cool motivator, don't you think? Here's the link: http://www.distco.org/

The Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) is an organization that helps people create short, first-person narratives that educate and/or inspire positive change. The organization hosts a number of workshops on digital storytelling, and distributes stories in a number of traditional and media formats. The website provides information about the organization's mission, features selected digital stories, and connects to a textbook, blog, and newsletter. If you plan to include digital storytelling you your classroom, whether ESL or any other type of class, the CDC looks like a great resource. I was able to review portions of the textbook, and it looks great!

Wondering how to structure a Digital Storytelling class? Trying to figure out what kinds of assignments to give your students? This website is for an ESL Digital Storytelling class at Mira Costa Community College in Oceanside, CA. The course is described, and activity descriptions are provided for each Digital Storytelling project for during a 9 week course (click on the link for Handout under the designated weeks). There are also handouts and instructions for how to use Audacity and Movie Maker. Looking for free images or music online? A nice list of links is on the left side of the screen. I think this is an excellent reference website if you ever plan on designing a Digital Storytelling course for ESL students.

Here's my blurb: If you decide to do a Digital Storytelling project in your ESL class, how do you go about evaluating it? What kind of rubrics do you use? This site discusses 16 types of communication (or genres) and 9 traits for scoring. It provides example rubrics. In fact, it provides a pretty neat rubric customization tool. There are suggestions and sample lesson plans for both formal and informal evaluation, and peer review activities. Quite nice! The resources section contains lots of PDFs about incorporating digital stories into the curriculum. Here's their blurb: DigiTales.us provides ideas, resources and inspiration for families, individuals, schools, organizations, corporations, churches and everyone else ready to discover the power and magic of merging the art of storytelling with the enchantment of using digital tools.

Want to learn French cooking, while learning French? Forget Julia Child! Go to the Digital Kitchen. This is a task-based learning "ambient kitchen." A computer gives cooking directions in French, and you try to follow them. All the cooking utensils are embedded with Wii-type movement sensor technology, so if the instructions are to stir with a spoon, the computer can tell if you have completed the action correctly. If you leave the oven on too long, the computer can give you feedback. I think this is absolutely crazy technology that could (with a lot of money) be applied to other areas of language teaching. Watch the video on the website. I think you will be impressed. I was.

Funded by the NSF, contains digital versions of children's books from all over the world. There are books in many languages, some with translations. Searchable by region, topic, and level. Could be assigned as extra reading homework, or used for projects.

This blog post discusses how both Google Drive and Evernote can be used to create E-portfolios. Both of these technologies are free and easy to use. For classrooms integrating the use of Ipads, this post has a number of tips on using the Ipad applications of these platforms for portfolio creation online.

This website provides digital books, activities, bulletin board ideas, cultural activities and more. Many of them are free and there are some that are paid.

I'm not sure if anyone has posted this already (so forgive me if this is a repeat!), but basically Tumblr is like a blog hybrid that allows you post just about anything (as the site states: "Post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos from your browser, phone, desktop, email or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors to your theme's HTML."). The site is very creativity-oriented, and seems like a potentially very useful online resource for students to express themselves creatively, to write and publish for a real audience, to gain exposure to cultural dimensions of the target speech community, and to enhance their digital literacy.

This is another digital storytelling website where you can make your own movie. You get to pick the scene, the characters, and the music, and then once you have a scene, you can write dialogue for the characters. It's easy to be really silly or really funny with this, so it would be a fun activity for students to practice writing.

Is there a way to get the characters to speak aloud, or do they just mouth the words silently when their speech bubbles appear?

Not that I could find, so it's a better writing/reading activity than listening/speaking. It's kind of hilarious, though.

It looks like the site busyteacher has lots of resources and links for...busy teachers. There are articles, worksheets, and links to seasonal activities. I'm posting this particular list of photo activities because (a) I think a lot of our students take pictures anyway and we could include them in the photo-gathering aspect of these projects, and (b) I think a lot of these activities can be adapted and incorporated into digital stories or grockit videos (or other CALL activities). Photo activities can provide context for teaching grammar or situational uses of language.