Currently, I am moderating a free online course, Digital Storytelling for Young Learners (http://digitalstorytelling4kids.pbworks.com) Over 250 participants have joined and have shared incredibly imaginative stories in our online class portfolio. One of the most surprising discoveries, though, was that 62% of the teachers who took our survey said they had never had their learners create digital stories. Our language learners have powerful stories to share and often share personal stories in blogs, Facebook, Youtube, or Twitter. Through digital storytelling we motivate our learners to apply, contextualize, visualize, and personalize the language they learn. There are 100s of free digital tools and websites to inspire your learners to create extremely imaginative stories and share them with a global audience. I hope the following tips and resources will help you along your journey towards integrating digital storytelling into your curriculum.

Tips

• Ease your students into sharing information about themselves by doing a fun icebreaker activity such as Show and Tell with a Cell! Simply have your students take out their cellphones, share one of their favorite pictures and tell the story behind the picture. If they can't use their cellphones then have them come into class with a picture.
• Teach your students about creative commons. Below I share some of my favorite websites.
• For collaborative projects and more detailed stories, have students plot ideas in a storyboard. Kevin Hodgson has some fantastic storyboarding worksheets here!
• I like to break my students into small groups of 4 and while they are creating their characters and drawing the scenes I elicit vocabulary from them. For example, I will ask questions such as, “Is this a boy or a girl?” “Is it hot or cold?” “Does she have blond or brown hair?”

Shelly Sanchez Terrell is an education thought-provoker,  teacher trainer, author, and international speaker. She is also the host of American TESOL's Free Friday Webinars and Social Media Community Manager for The Consultants-E. Find her on Twitter, @ShellTerrell.