A Moment in Time

Photo by Mike Grenville

Apparently, yesterday was World Storytelling Day and so BBC Five Live asked listeners to send in emails, text messages etc describing what they were doing at midday on Tuesday 20th March. If you click here you can what kind of responses they got.

This sounds like a great idea for a lesson, i.e. ask your students what they were doing/thinking about at a particular time on the day of the lesson. Their answers can be posted on their blog(s) as text or in the form of a YouTube video.

Alternatively, you could ask them to take a picture at say 3.00 pm Thursday 22nd March and post it on their Flickr page along with a suitable title and description. See here for Five Live's photo set.

Digital storytelling

I should have guessed it. I've been working on producing videos without video cameras over the last few weeks. The idea is that students use still photographs, either their own or images taken off the internet to create a video which can be posted on their blogs. A quick delve into the web has revealed that there are loads of educators doing the same thing. I came across a particular good site called Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling at the University of Houston that has lots of information on using Microsoft's Photo Story 3 (check out their tutorial pages) and great examples of projects that students can use for inspiration.

In addition, courtesy of a blogger writing in Romania (see here) I came across Comic Life a program that allows you to create comics using your photos. I know of at least one student who is going to love that idea. The only problem is that it is only for Mac OSX. If anyone knows of a similar program for Windows, please contact me.