I Dig Digital Storytelling!

Saturday's class was fantastic because I got to do something I love best, create stories! I am really excited by the use of storytelling in world languages and I discovered a really great tool to create stories digitally for my Spanish class. Prezi is not only fun, but a really powerful tool for creating stories with zooming images and text. I can't wait for kids to try it out. In the past, we have always used Notebook and Voicethread to create stories since they are simple and inserting images is easy. I will still use both of those tools. Voicethread is so valuable to world language learners since it has the ability to record oral language. But, I'm now really excited by the possibilities of using Prezi with kids to write and tell stories in new and creative ways.

I created this presentation that I will use for my 3rd grade Spanish class (another reason I loved Saturday's class is that I got a lesson done!)

Mini-Cuento on Prezi

The process of creating this story was both exciting and frustrating. It was exciting because it's been awhile since I've seen technology that is so flexible and creative. It was frustrating because It took me awhile to get the hang of how to edit and add pictures and manipulate the "zebra" wheel. It was almost like learning a new sport and my fingers had to develop muscle memory to be able to control the zoom feature, etc. It helped sitting next to Laura who had just learned about Prezi at a conference in Shanghai. She was able to answer most of the questions that I had.

One of my goals as a teacher this year is to use storytelling to provide comprehensible input for my kids so this COETAIL class was really helpful to me. It allowed me the opportunity to not only learn about new ways of tellling stories, but to actually implement what I learned.