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Fiona Beal of SchoolNet South Africa reports - also see the course blog
Introduction
It has been a great privilege for SchoolNet to be involved in this wonderful project by creating and running a four week online course in digital storytelling from 15th April to 15th May. This course, sponsored by the African Storybook Project, was free to teachers around South Africa and was advertised to SchoolNet's database of teachers as well as promoted on its social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and the SchoolNet blog. 127 teachers signed up before the starting date but quite a number signed up after the closing date and had to be turned away. We were thrilled at the enthusiasm for the course.
The aim of the course
The aim of the course was to introduce teachers to online digital writing and demonstrate how it can enrich both themselves and their learners. We wanted to take them through the simple steps for creating and publishing an online story suitable for a Grade 1-3 learner and then hopefully duplicate the process with their classes. The main objective was to create a bank of stories for the African Storybook Project website once it is launched. The incentive for the teachers was an offer of an opportunity to attend an international reading and writing conference in Nairobi in August for a teacher from the school that submitted the most useable stories.
The structure of the course
During the first week of the course, participants learned about digital storytelling, online safety for their students and Creative Commons licensing methods for online creations. During the second week of the course, the participants learned about the different methods of creating a story, and practised writing a story offline. In the third week of the course, participants were introduced to using a presentation application such as PowerPoint for their digital writing, and they discovered places to find royalty-free illustrations on the Internet. They were introduced to different free platforms for hosting a presentation online. In the final week of the course, participants were encouraged to transfer their story to one of the lovely, free, creative digital tools available on the web. They were shown how to select the right tool. The participants were also given guidelines on what the African storybook team is looking for in a story.
The results of the course
The course was run via a blog with a weekly task and opportunity for teachers to post their comments and thoughts on the blog. The teachers were given until the end of the 2nd term (21 June 2013) to submit their stories. We are thrilled to have received approximately 300 stories with several teachers requesting an extension of time into next term. The result was a delightful array of stories that children will love reading.
Highlights of the course
One of the highlights of the course was that a number of teachers wrote in after the course with photos of themselves and the class writing the stories as well as a short summary of how they went about writing them. These were posted on the course blog.
The exciting thing to note is the variety of methods of illustration that teachers used.
What teachers said about the course
Many of the teachers commented that the week where they learned about Creative Commons licensing had been an eye-opener for them. Positive comments about the course continually streamed in with some teachers saying they had discovered a hidden talent within themselves. Here are a few of the comments:
- “This has been so much fun. Thank you for this wonderful opportunity. I can't wait to start working with the other story/writing tools!” - Karin Horne: Deputy Principal at Crawford Preparatory School, Pretoria.
- “ I had never seen kids so excited about a project before. They actually begged to remain in the computer centre during breaks and after school.” - Eden Daniels,the Grade 7 English teacher at Princess Primary School in Roodepoort.
- “In fact, my class today asked if they could stay in at break and carry on! That says it all don't you think? Still quite a way to go, but so far so good... Thank you.” – Liesel Kruger, Stirling Primary School, East London
- “This is a really exciting project. The portal of stories will be great - but
the African Storybook Project is also doing worthwhile work in terms of encouraging good writing.” Yolandi Ferreira, Laerskool Helderkruin in Johannesburg.
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