Flickr is definitely a great picture library, with Flickr Photos you can just type the key words to explore the pictures you need. With such a powerful tool, teachers can do a lot of things. They can use it to create a story for any short stories or poems. I will use Flicker to create short story for my lesson. I can also use it for vocabulary teaching to help the students understand the meaning of the words. The pictures together with audio will help the students to understand the lesson more quickly. For example, in my short digital story-telling, Bookr-The Boy Who Cried Wolf, I try to help the students to understand what happened in the story ; the pictures combined with the words will leave a deep memory in their heads. So when use such a tool, the objective can be understanding the theme of the story based on the audio and pictures.
Teachers can also ask the students to create their own story. The story can be very short poems and simple stories about themselves. Each students can create a story to introduce themselves. They can choose the special pictures in them life and post any important things happened before. Such a lesson can be a great opportunity for teachers to know more about your students as well as let the students be more familiar each other faster. Most of all, it is a great experience for the students to practice their ability in using technology.
Kids in today's classroom are different from the kids in the past century. They play computer games at home, they use Powerpoint at school, they even have their own iPADs , cell phones. So it is necessary to combine technology with story-telling. According to The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling, the digital story-telling is a kind of combination of the art of telling stories and a variety of multimedia, including graphs, audio, video and Web publishing.
However, it is a not an easy job to apply Digital Story-telling for teaching purposes. First of all, teachers can create digital stories by themselves, to combine your teaching topic with a digital story is a great way to raise the students' interests and concentration for your class. Especially, when teachers have a difficult topic which is a challenge for your students to understand, digital story-telling is definitely a great choice.
Furthermore, digital story-telling can also be a powerful tool to encourage the students to create their own story. Teachers can give the students several instruction classes about how to make a digital story by themselves. After the students have known how to create a digital story, it's time for them to practice. Teachers can distribute the students as a couple of groups, and each of the group members has various role: collecting pictures, brainstorming, audio. This can be a great opportunity for the students to practice collaborative learning as well as a nice experience for technology practice.
