DIGITAL STORY TELLING

An exciting, on-line workshop about drama, storytelling, and technology for language learning

The digital age meets folktale in this workshop demonstrating practical ways to use technology in order to capitalize on the power of storytelling and drama in language learning. This workshop structure blends hands-on ready-to-use activities with ideas of how to design and integrate them with digital language learning experiences.

These activities explore a familiar folktale included in many ELT textbooks for young learners, The Gigantic Turnip, and integrate the development of variety of language skills with digital tools. You can find a series of lesson ideas using the folktale by navigating the sidebar on the righthand side of this page. Lesson ideas can be mixed and matched, but they include drama warmers, predicting and ordering exercises, participatory reading, art and writing, frozen story pictures, hot seating interviews, class productions, and personal story books. Ideas for integrating technology include digital photography, on-line dictionaries, games, audio files, and multi-source editing web pages called pbwikis.

The final pages of this online workshop include additional resources for your exploration and an idea-sharing discussion page full of ideas for adapting materials to other folktales, stories, textbooks, and non-fiction. Please share your ideas by mailing them to Jennifer Uhler so they can be posted here.

These materials were originally piloted at the Korean National University Summer Teacher Training Institute at the University of Montana and presented at the Estonian Association of Teachers of English Annual Conference in Tartu, Estonia and the 41st International Annual IATEFL Conference and Exhibition in Aberdeen, Scotland by Jennifer Uhler, English Language Fellow at the University of Tartu, Estonia.