Digital Storytelling Project: How to make Pompoms

This week’s project is digital storytelling. My partner Elçin Çepni and I worked together on this project. Our instructor gave us three options to choose from and we decided to go with the second option which is ‘HOW TO project’.

 For this project, we were required to demonstrate either a real or an imaginary process. In order to demonstrate the process, we had to explain it step by step adding videos, photos and narration. Our video was not supposed to be longer than 2 minutes, which I found inadequate for this task but after all, the task itself has to be challenging! Finding a creative idea was also a bit challenging. However, we managed to come up with a lot of different ideas but not every one of them was creative. We had to discuss every aspect of each idea we found including having had to explain it in just two minutes. In the end, we decided on the idea of how to make pompoms. We thought it was creative, cute and explainable-in-two-minutes kind of idea! We asked my mother to help us demonstrate pompom making as she is really a crafty person. We took the video of her making a pompom first and added narration to it later. We recorded our voices and explained the process step by step. We used Movie Maker to edit our work.

 I found this project quite enjoyable, to be honest. It was a bit challenging to come up with the perfect idea and also kind of time consuming to arrange and complete everything but during the process, my partner and I actually had fun. We enjoyed this task more than both our podcast and film review task even though it took much longer to complete. I believe that my partner and I came up with a good outcome as a result of our collaborative work. After all, this task would not be efficient if done individually. It is important to discuss the ideas and organize all the work together as it leads to the best outcome. People can always lead each other for the better if they work collaboratively.

 In my opinion, creating a digital story would contribute to students’ foreign language development as students get to practice their writing and speaking skills but it especially enhances creativity, communication, collaborative work and technological skills. I think these four are the most important aspects of digital storytelling project. 

Here is our project: