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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/

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.

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!

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.

The Moth is a storytelling program that broadcasts weekly stories told by anyone - famous people or every day folks. It's a great listening resource, especially for getting a glimpse of American life, but would require you to pre-screen the stories (some are not appropriate for students at all). It is also probably best suited for adult advanced learners.

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.