TRAVEL HUNGER: ONCE UPON A TIME ...

- Storytelling -

Today I would like to talk about my storytelling assignment. I did the task individually.

Our teacher gave us three different storytelling projects to choose from. I chose Project 1 - Creating a Public Service Announcement (PSA). These are short announcements/summaries that are meant to inform, educate, and in the best-case scenario, move humanity to action.

The teacher told us to think about what facts we want to include, what target audience we want to address, make sure that our topic is brief but its reason is clearly stated, and what goal we want to achieve or what we would like people to do after watching our storytelling video.

I chose to create a video about the environmental pollution issue in turkey through waste with the goal that people take their own action on the chosen issue. My biggest obstacle was to stick to the given time span of the video (60 sec.) which, as you can see from my video, I did NOT succeed in. It was simply impossible for me to limit this topic to 60 sec., even though that might have consequences for my grade.

For creating my storytelling video I used the platform 'Vimeo' which offers a great selection of templates, stickers, short clip videos, and general design editing sectors. The website was easy to use, editing went without a hitch and the video was downloaded without a problem. I then recorded my voiceover, looked for some quiet piano music, and played both audio files onto my video using 'InShot'. InShot is a great mobile app to edit and recreate videos, super easy to use, downloads work without problems and it offers a good quality as well.

Storytelling is helpful for the language classroom because it is a place to practice English language skills as well as communication skills in general and it builds a community (perhaps if people would like to share their opinion about your storytelling topic because they feel personally attached to it). Creating the video could increase computer skills and knowledge about helpful designing tools on the internet.

Furthermore, the creativity of the students is stimulated, the topics and possibilities of interpretation are multifaceted and, to a large extent, the students work on something they have chosen themselves.