Sean Banville's Blog

OurStory.com – Digital Storytelling 1

“OurStory.com goes beyond blogging to permanently capture life’s stories in words and photos. Publish or share the stories privately with family and friends.”

I spent the whole of last semester enjoying this wonderful site with my students. We all loved it for many different reasons. It’s a very intuitive, easy-to-use site that records events in the form of a timeline. It’s easy to add photos and videos.

The site also has a fantastic section on “Question Sets”.  These are large collections of questions on topics such as love, travel, family, etc that can be answered and added to your timeline. They are a totally brilliant resource for ESL classes. There are 252 questions in “Baby Story”, 222 in “Love Story” and 740 in “Remember When”. These provide any teacher with an exhaustive array of filler / end-of-lesson activities, if needed.

I started using OurStory.com because I wanted a way for my students to keep their journals online but got sidetracked into using it for something else. I still think the site would be a fantastic way for students to record their thoughts online, attach pictures and share collaborate with others.

So…I started using the site as a class reflection. After every couple of lessons, I would write up a little summary of what happened in the class and my feelings. I had to remember to include each student in my posts so they were all mentioned equally.

This is what I did the next time I saw my class after writing each online post:

• Turn off the lights and display the site on the white board. My students liked this and eagerly awaited the ‘report’ I had written.
• Different students would read different sentences from my post. After each sentence, there was opportunity for students to feed back on my thoughts. This was usually quite fun. Students blushed when I said nice things and were quite vocal in defending themselves if I wrote something they disagreed with. It was always good-natured.
• We often had a quick discussion about anything that needed to change in the class from that time on – me, my teaching, my materials, student behaviour, etc.
• Before I turned the lights on again, I asked the class what they thought my next post would contain. This (perhaps… I hope) made the class reflect on what they would do in the upcoming lessons. I wrote down any student ideas and put them in my next post to see if they came true or not.

This reflection worked for me because:

• it was a fantastic way to conduct a class discussion with students about their learning and my teaching.
• it allowed me to focus on and incorporate (welcome) students on an equal basis -  noisier students don’t get to take up more of the teacher’s time here.
• it allowed me to “say” things to the class they might not listen to had I actually said them.
• students were very active in talking about my comments.
• they were all quiet at the beginning of class every time I put up the OurStory site.
• it provided a good record for me to go back to certain events to reinforce times when I was “right”. Especially good after exams when I reminded them we had talked about the importance of self-study only three weeks earlier!
• after a few posts, the students realized I actually listened to what they said and did change things. I think that brought a lot of trust to the classroom.
• it really was great fun. I found the banter between us was my favourite part of the class.
• I could use it to reintroduce my grammar “frustrations” (… and after three lessons students are still forgetting to use the infinitive after ‘did’) or reinforce key teaching points from earlier lessons.
• it was great for recycling class vocabulary (‘metalanguage’) and vocab from their texts.

There are many other reasons but I need to keep this post ‘of blog length’.

A new semester starts tomorrow.

I greatly look forward to two new stories with my two new classes.

I greatly look forward to sharing more with you about this lovely website