One of the more powerful ways to connect students to learning is to tell a story. Telling a story helps create an emotional connection between students and content, and can help illuminate simple, complex, and abstract concepts.
Tomas Pueyo captures the essence of stories in his TEDxHumboldtBay video, “Why Stories Captivate“.
Stories do not have to take place in a group or other face-to-face setting. Stories can also be created using various online tools.
A Few Tools for Telling Stories with Technology
Microsoft Sway
Microsoft Sway is a free tool allowing users to create presentations from a multitude of sources, including social media sources, photography sites, Microsoft Office documents, and more. Its interface is completely web based, making it compatible on any device with a modern web browser.
Here’s a video from Microsoft that explains Sway in more detail.
Interested? Try out Microsoft Sway.
Adobe Spark
Adobe Spark is a feature-filled tool to create visual stories in a multitude of ways. Spark supports the creation of graphics, web pages, and videos from a multitude of resources.
- Graphics can be created like infographics, social media posts, comics, and in many other ways.
- Web pages can mix photos, text, buttons, and videos. They also support creating various layouts with a few quick clicks.
- Videos can be created with a simple interface allowing for other videos, text, and photos to be combined.
Spark also contains a series of templates for all types of creations, allowing a user to modify an existing design to their purposes rather than to create one completely from scratch.
Here’s a great video on how Spark is used in an elementary classroom, just an example of one of its many uses.
Spark is available for use on the web, a series of iPad & iPhone apps, and an app for Android.
Interested? Try out Adobe Spark.
Questions
Have questions about telling stories, instruction, course design, teaching methods, technology to help, or more? Please contact the Center for Teaching & Learning through our contact form or by phone at (708) 974-5347.