Case Study: Digital Storytelling in Argentina

Vicky Saumell is co-ordinator of the EFL Department at Instituto San Francisco de Asís, a private school in Buenos Aires, Argentina that has 800 students at all levels, from kindergarten to secondary. She has worked there for 20 years and has been using learning technology with learners and teachers for six years. Since then, she has developed from using ICT in her own classes to helping other teachers integrate technology into their classroom practice and training other teachers as well.

When taking into account how English was taught at the school, she felt that students were not offered the best option for learning because teachers were relying too much on the coursebook to drive the English curriculum, taking the risk of forcing students to work on something that didn’t reflect their personal interests or that wasn’t completely suitable for them. So, she decided to develop a new curriculum, and as the department agreed with her, they did away with coursebooks, which they found were not appealing to students and sometimes forced teachers to deal with topics that had nothing to do with students' interests. Then, teachers started designing and planning their own projects taking into account students’ interests, what they wanted and liked. Another important feature of this project was the assessment, because the department also decided to do away with formal testing. In this way, teachers assessed students' work on the process of creation and on the final product.

This project was welcomed with enthusiasm because it provided interesting and attractive ideas and offered a creative output, which resulted in increased motivation for teachers and students as well.

As regards the context, Vicky Saumell used "Digital Storytelling" with three classes of twenty learners aged 17. The idea of this project was to combine the art of telling stories with a variety of digital multimedia.

Taking into account the TPCK Model, we can identify the use of technology in the creation of wikis to keep record of the projects being carried out and to upload the final products of each of them, the different tools for digital storytelling, such as Windows Movie Maker, soundtrack recorder, animated cartoons from Zimmer Twins software. 

As regards pedagogy, the idea of one of these projects was for students to work in groups, choosing famous paintings and writing a narrative that linked the stories together and finally, through Windows Movie Maker, they had to create an animated slideshows and record a soundtrack saying what they liked about the graffiti.

Recreating a part of Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare was another project within Digital Storytelling. Here, students had to use different tools to develop digital literacy skills.

In my opinion, Vicky Saumell found a successful way to modify the whole syllabi and made it meaningful to students and to teachers using appealing and authentic materials. I think she succeeded in getting to the different levels of Puentedura's SAMR Model. Parts of these projects are at the Subtitution level , for example students write a story but instead of doing it in paper, they do it online and surrounded by multimedia and web tools. In the case of soundtracks, we can say that they stand at the Modification level as they couldn't have recorded it without technology.

Most important, I think she reached the Redefinition Level because she used technology to improve the way students learned and the contents they acquired.