Okay, so I know it's mid-March and I should know exactly what I'm going to do for my final project... but.... you guessed it! I don't. I thought at the end of course 4 I had it all figured out. My students were going to make common craft style videos to tell stories in Spanish. It all sounded so exciting, until I started to really think about it. Primarily, I thought about how much time my students would be spending drawing their stick figure people, animals, objects, arrows, etc. that are all essential parts of a good common craft video. I did a quick calculation and realized that the enormous amount of time they would not be engaged or using Spanish would be colossal. I realized that I needed to figure out a way to limit the "art" time and focus on actually speaking, reading, writing, and listening to Spanish...in other words, using the language. This is, after all, what is going to help my students become better Spanish learners. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to stifle creativity and art, but I want to limit the amount of time we focus on that part of the process. Additionally, I started thinking about managing all those little papers that would make up their common craft video and immediately had visions of kids shoving them into their disorganized folders, coming to class the next day and declaring, "Srta. Montegna have you seen my stick figure of the dog for my story about el perro gordo, I swear I put it in my folder!" So, I started doing some research into other storytelling options and I found two that look really promising; Stripgenerator and Zooburst.
Stripgenerator is basically an online comic strip. It is a bit limited in terms of character options, colors (everything is black and white), etc. but maybe the simplicity is actually a good thing. How many times have I stood for an eternity in the cereal isle of a large American grocery store with glazed over eyes and drool pooling at the corners of my mouth because there were too MANY options? Maybe the simplicity will allow students to avoid spending hours searching through different avatar options. Maybe they'll have more time to actually work with the language. The other plus about Stripgenerator are the sharing options and embedding options, allowing students to post strips on their blog or share on Facebook. I also appreciate the intuitiveness of the website. It's easy to use from the start.
Zooburst is another great tool for storytelling. It's a digital storytelling site that allows users to create 3-D pop-up books. The nice part about Zooburst is the ability for student to not only write dialogue in their stories but to also use their own voices to enable their characters to come to "life". As a language teacher, this appeals to me since it allows students to practice their speaking skills. Like stripgenerator it has some sharing options, including embedding. An interesting part of Zooburst is that users can experience Zooburst stories in augmented reality with a webcam. It's $49.99 a year for the full options (including voice) so it is an investment, but that fee also comes with the ability for teachers to set up a virtual classroom space within zooburst and give students their own usernames and passwords. This classroom management piece is important to me as I've experience frustration with Voicethread and other sites which makes the management piece and therefore the implementation of technology in the classroom painful at times.
So, now the question becomes, which digital storytelling method do I want to use with my students? Should I let them choose? Or should I make it simple for them so they are not left drooly-mouthed and glazed over in the middle of Spanish class?
