Digital Storytelling: A pleasant experience

digital-storytelling-brainshark

LINC students and staff at Collège Éducacentre College in Vancouver, B.C. 
Photo by Julien Capraro

Digital storytelling: A pleasant experience
Story by Heng Bian, LINC student at Collège Éducacentre College

Last month our class did digital story presentations
using a program called Brainshark.

Do you know Brainshark?
It not only has a cool name,
but it is a software program.
It lets you tell a story
using pictures and audio.

Planning my topic
First, I had to choose
an important life event topic for my story and write it down in English.
Four months ago, my family immigrated to Canada
to our new home in Vancouver,
so I decided to talk about our new home.

Writing and re-writing
I wrote many drafts and
my teacher helped me
to polish my story.

Taking photographs
I had to take photos of my new house for the slideshow
to go along with the story.

Choosing music
Then I needed to create a mood for the story,
so I selected
some background music.

The other reason
for the background music
was to hide
my poor pronunciation.

Speaking and recording
It was time to record my voice-over for each slide.
This process gave me
the opportunity to practice
my speaking skills.

The software allowed me
to record many times
for one slide instead of re-doing the whole slideshow.

Challenging, but fun
Although the process of making a story was challenging for me
because of my English level,
I still thought it was
a pleasurable experience,
and it was fun to see
the final product.

Submission by Mark Perrault, Instructor at Collège Éducacentre College

Rajeeta Samala, LINC Program Coordinator at Collège Éducacentre College
and Digital Storytelling Facilitator for this project gives a more detailed account
of the project and process in the Teachers’ Notes (June 2015) and below:

Digital storytelling
A special thanks to Surya Govender and Sara Yuen
from goldenthreadstories.ca.
Surya and Sara provided the training for digital storytelling.

Rajeeta Samala, LINC Program Coordinator
at Collège Éducacentre College,
explains why she chose digital stories
and brainshark.com as a tool for a class project.

The instructors wanted everyone,
including beginner students, to participate.
Digital stories are a great way for every level
of student to share their personal lives
with their loved ones and classmates
in one to three minutes with the help of
pictures, words, music and technology.

Students also got to work on their L, S, R & W skills
to create their projects.

Rajeeta taught learners how to use the software.
Later, most learners could
work with minimum guidance from the instructors.

Students could also work at home and help their classmates.
Brainshark is more user-friendly than other apps
such as iMovie and other websites such as StoryMaker, says Rajeeta.

Students celebrated all their hard work
with a “Movie Night” when students could screen their movies.