Price = Free!
I have always been a gadget lover. I am definitely an early adopter of new technologies. However, I did not start thinking a lot about the educational uses of technology until I learned about something called Digital Storytelling. About seven years ago, one of my colleagues in the Communications department at UVa-Wise, Amy Clark, gave a presentation to all of the professors who were planning to teach the 1st year, freshman seminar course at the College. During the talk she provided us with a variety of ways to promote writing in our classes, and Digital Storytelling was one of the methods she introduced. I was immediately intrigued because I could see how it would benefit language learners by promoting writing and speaking in a very personal way; by telling a story. I began doing some research into the process and came across this webpage from the University of Houston: http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/
I began to ask my students to produce digital stories about their weekend, a trip they took, their semester, their family, etc. These ended up being about 2 minutes long and required a process of writing drafts and revisions followed by adding photos and recorded narration to a program that created the video. It's a great process and my students have been making videos for about six years in all of my classes. At first, before I had tested it out, the technical requirements added a lot of extraneous cognitive load to the activity, but now that I can anticipate the difficulties that might arise, I have really streamlined the process so that the students can focus on writing and recording the story in the target language as opposed to struggling with the technology.
I will discuss the longer video creation apps in a later post. This current post is actually on Animoto, a webpage and now an APP that creates very short, video slide shows with text-based narration. This is a project that students can complete in less than one class period and it only requires a device with access to the Internet: a computer, a tablet, a phone, or an iPod. It very definitely works in a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) classroom, and is ideal for classes with 1:1 technology. Basically, you upload around 5 or 6 photos from a variety of sources such as the Internet, your device's hard drive, your Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Picasa accounts, or from the Animoto photo collection. Unfortunately, the app doesn't provide the same access to your online photo collections, so if you are using the app you'll need to save the photos you want to the device in advance. Once the photos are uploaded you can add text boxes to narrate the photos. I have my online students create an autobiographical video in the target language with Animoto and it's a great icebreaker/getting to know you activity.
Animoto is free IF you are willing to create videos that are 30 seconds or less. There is also a limit on the number of characters you can write in each text box, although this number just increased a bit. I actually see the time limit as an advantage. It's very easy to want to include way too much when you're making a video, especially one about yourself, so the time limit encourages economy and it makes you choose only the most important things that you wish to communicate. It also makes it the perfect project to do in one class period. As for the character limitation, if our students use Twitter then they have already been trained to conform to a character limit, so I don't think they even think twice. It is also useful in beginning and intermediate classes because it keeps the novice from trying to use language that is beyond their current capabilities (not that this is necessarily a bad thing but it can cause frustration if they can't express themselves) by requiring them to keep it short and sweet.
Once the videos are created there are a ton of ways that they can be shared. There are share links to all of the social media sites; recently they even added a Pinterest share option! It can be shared via email with the link and they provide HTML code that can be copied and used on a webpage (I use wikispaces.com). Here's my latest autobiographical video!
Try our video maker at Animoto.
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