Developing Writing and Oral Communication Skills
Teachers are enhancing their content-based lessons using 21st Century tools to develop ESL students’ language and communication skills. They are discovering that digital storytelling projects increase motivation, creativity and overall achievement in the language classroom. Â Not only do learning projects like this enhance the acquisition of English, but the students are also acquiring transferable 21st skills.
Free or fee-based Â online subscriptions to sites such as discoveryeducation.com provide teachers with a variety of media that can be searched by subject, grade or media type as well as lesson plan resources and classroom management tools. Teachers have the option to download full video or video segments and to save what they like so that students can view and review them anytime or anywhere.
Teachers and students can script, record and edit their own digital stories. The Flip camcorder is portable and easy to use, but we don’t use their editing software.Â Instead video clips can be imported into Windows MovieMaker or iMovie to create video lessons and study prep guides on content area topics.Â Both MovieMaker and iMovie allow the user to import additional sound and picture files to create a movie project that is polished, professional and tailored to the learning objectives of the class.
Hall Davidson, www.discoveryedspeakersbureau.com, an expert on digital storytelling and teaching with media technology states: â€œWhat veteran teachers suspected the research has proved: 21st Century students are different. With different attention spans, higher IQ test scores, and social networks, their sophistication comes earlierâ€”with a different skill set. There is a silver lining: We can teach this â€œNew Brainâ€ more effectively, more efficiently, more engagingly. We have the technology! Media has evolved and education must evolve to match.â€