Week Four (part one)

Story Retelling - Dust Echoes
Today's session began with Greg showing us a lovely little flash animation video from the Dust Echoes: Ancient Stories, New Voices website (which can be found here). Greg tells us that we'll be using this website to select, and then retell a story from one of the flash videos on the site by 'Print Screen'-ing and cropping images, before pasting them in Inspiration. This seems like it will be a superb way of engaging students within stories (and not just Indigenous Australian stories). It is also a new and engaging way of retelling stories that I have not encountered before - that is a computer-based, visual retelling.

I chose the video called Namorrodor, which is the story of a creature, signalled into life by a shooting star. The Namorrodor hunts at night and this video is concerned with the Namorrodor's hunting of a baby. However, the baby's mother manages to fight off the Namorrodor before he manages to capture the baby.

The exact method of creating the retelling (the one I created is on the right) is:
1. take 'print screen' shots of the video at crucial points in the story.
2. cut out the relevant part of the shot in Paint and then paste it in the Inspiration program.
3. then arrange the shots in Inspiration in an artistic order - a retelling of the video.
4. perhaps you can add text as well - I did. (I took the text from the PDF document avaliable on the Dust Echoes website).

I'm really quite excited/impressed by this method of retelling. It is not something I have encountered in the classroom and I am sure to put it into use.