It's Your Story Tell It Your Way!

I never would have thought that using digital storytelling within the ESL classroom could help facilitate

learning for my students until I explored its history, uses, and one particular digital storytelling site.  As a matter of fact, I was not aware of this educational practice until only recently; to be exact my first semester at the University at Buffalo about five months ago.  So for anybody who is new to this practice, like me, and is interested in exploring its educational benefits some more you can find information through many sites.  One site I enjoyed, The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling, explains clearly what it is, some history and gives a clear definition.  Basically digital storytelling is "combining the art of telling stories with a variety of multimedia, including graphics, audio, video, and web publishing."  There are many ways to use this tool within the classroom to facilitate learning.  Teachers can create their own digital stories and use them to supplement lessons to make them more meaningful and interesting to the students or to present new material; these stories can also be used as a way to enhance a discussion about topics within a story.  Teachers can also use this tool as an assignment and have the students create their own stories.  Of course it would be vital for the teacher to first present this tool to the students and show them how it works and give them some examples.  This is a great tool to use for ESL students because it can help them practice how to write creatively as well as

informative writing; they can create fictional stories as well as non-fiction stories based on historical and/or scientific information for example.  This would also be a fun assignment for the students as they are able to insert pictures, videos and audio depending on the site that is used.  They also have a unique finished product to be very proud of and that is published to the web for their friends and family to view whenever. I have experience using zooburst which is a very fun and easy site to navigate.  I created a "story" for my educational psychology course in which I was instructed to use the information from specific chapters of my text.  My story is Classroom Assessment, grading and Standardized Testing.  One feature about this site that makes it interesting and fun is the images pop out of the book.  This was a very easy tool to learn to use and I feel it will be very beneficial in the ESL classroom to use as assignments for my students and to facilitate learning the English language.  I am glad I was exposed to this classroom practice and learning tool and am exciting to incorporate it in my future classroom.