Digital Stories

It is in a workshop for developing Chinese teacher in the US that I got to know how to use digital stories to teach languages. The presenter in that workshop showed us the video on the left hand side. This vedio was about the Latern Festival in China.  Since the objective of this course was to review different colors and learn the structure "color + item", there were many phrases such as "red latern", "green latern", "yellow latern", "grey latern" and so on. When a yellow latern appeared, the words "yellow latern" were sounded out. Different pictures enabled the drills not boring at all.
I once used this digital stories to teach kids after the workshop. After watching the video, kids could be able to figure out the structure "color + item". Also, since words were associated with images, students remembered the words very firmly.

After the first successful experience of using digital stories, I made quite a few digital stories myself. The reason why I made stories myself was that I was not quite satisfied with some textbooks, particularlly some textbooks for children. Those textbooks usually lack picutres, and therefore it's hard to attrat children's attention and interests. Even though some textbooks have some pictures, what I desired was to have each sentence or phrase correspond to each picture, which was hard to be realized. Thanks to digital stories, I can create my own textbooks. There are tons of amazing picutres accessible online, and I can select whatever I want to make the digital stories. Sometimes I even invite my friends to read the scripts, and my students are always excited to hear different voices. I really enjoy creating digital stories and also using them to teach students. Of coures, students love them as well.