Digital Storytelling in L2 Learning



Screen capture from the Bookr website


Digital storytelling has not only become an important form of social media and expressive creativity, but it is steadily growing in its importance educationally. While many varying forms of social media can be considered a means of digital storytelling, from short fictional films and narrated presentations to online documentaries and musically-backed slideshows, one very simple but unique and fun way to share a story is with the webtool Bookr. With Bookr, users can search for photos on flickr that are part of the Creative Commons' licensing and legally use them with their own writing to publish a virtual mini-book on the internet.

While it can serve only as a toy for some creative and amusing illustrated tales, it can also serve the classroom as part of a short assignment that incorporates creative thinking with a personal touch that keeps both the writer / student and the reader interested. Here is an example of a short Bookr creation I have made to demonstrate how simple it is to manage either for personal or educational use, though it is maybe best-suited for older adolescents and adults (the Bookr tool and the example!).
Specifically for ESL or foreign language classrooms, a creative writing assignment utilizing Bookr can be an exercise in compositions skills, with the objectives of putting into practice one's proficiency levels in syntax, grammar, and lexical depth and flexibility. Also, in examining fellow classmates' projects and being asked to respond to the stories, reading comprehension can be evaluated.

One can picture a lesson where students are asked to compose an illustrated Bookr story with a given number of "pages." Part two of the assignment would ask students to expand on each others' stories by adding one slide to all of the other Bookr creations (depending on class size, of course). This would lead to a progressive story construction that would certainly be amusing while watching where the story leads. This assignment would provide a reasonable opportunity for an informal or possibly a formal (depending on rubric flexibility) assessment that examines the skills mentioned above.