We have a new guest
blogger !!!!!
About me:
My name is Susan Dreger and I’ve been teaching students of all ages for
the past 23 years in Barcelona, Spain. I
have a masters in Technology and TESOL and am an avid fan of using technology
to enhance language learning. I can take
most Web 2.0 tools and find a way to use them in the foreign language
classroom!
Follow me:
Twitter: @susandreger
Do you or your students have a story to tell? Do you like reading, writing, drawing or all
of the above? Do you want to join one of
the largest storytelling communities in the world?
If you are not yet familiar with STORYBIRD, it’s time
to see what you’ve been missing! Storybird is a fantastic writing tool which
allows you or your students to create beautifully illustrated stories using
incredible artwork from artists around the world. Storybird allows you to make visual stories
in seconds!
Last year I used
Storybird with a group of 15-year old Spanish students who were not at all
interested in writing in English. Let’s
just say that it was the end of the year and they weren’t feeling very inspired
to write in English. I took a chance by
showing them Storybird as I knew that there was the possibility of them finding
the task somewhat ‘childish’. Instead of
presenting the task to them as a simple storywriting task, I told them that
they should imagine writng a story for small children. I asked questions such as, “What do small
kids worry about?”, “What do they like?”, “What are their fears?” or “What
types of emotions do small children often show?”. Then I showed them some examples of Storybird
and of the incredible selections of artwork that can be found for illustrating
stories. Once they understood what
Storybird was all about and they had the idea that their story would be created
for young learners, I took them to the computers and away they went!
To my surprise they quickly
chose an artist of their choice and began working on their stories. They were totally engaged in the activity and
only stopped each time they needed help with vocabulary or sentence
structure. Because of the fact that the
stories were being written for young children, they were able to write most of
them with minimal help from me, using very simple, commonly used vocabulary.
After the one-hour
class was finished, most of them had produced some great stories. In fact, I
don’t even care if all of their stories weren’t so great. My students had
written in English, had fun doing it and had CREATED stories that they were
proud of in less than an hour!
It was great to see the
results and have them genuinely want to save their story and make sure that it
didn’t get lost. In order to facilitate the task with the time limit we had, I
saved all of their stories in my account and then they invited themselves as
collaborators. I’ve seen that as a teacher you can set up classes and add the
students beforehand but as I mentioned, this was a last minute attempt to find
something that would interest them so I didn’t have time for that.
As an alternative to
this activity, you could even write a collective story as a class using the
projector and the big screen. In any case, I would definitely recommend this
great tool, for all ages!
Here are a couple of
examples of the stories they created:
Thank you Susan for accepting to be my guest blogger !!!
Loved the idea of using Storybird. It is so much fun and creative.
