I think I have mentioned a few times in previous
EduFlickr posts that
Flickr (and other online photo sharing tools) can be a great source of images and that these images can be used to stimulate creative writing. I've been meaning for some time to write a post about telling stories with
Flickr but
Alan has already given
an excellent introduction to
fliction. I will therefore content myself some observations and a couple of examples.
Although I have titled this
Telling tales and I've talked about "creative writing", it should not be assumed that the English department is going to have all the fun. Apart from anything else, one of the examples Alan gives is of the
Tell a story in 5 frames group where the pictures tell the story. Of course once a visual story has been published, often people give their interpretation in the comments and in the discussion area, so there is still scope for creative writing. However, I think some of the best submissions to this group demonstrate the power pictures to carry a story. For example one of my favourites is
Women!, which tells a story in only three pictures. (See them here:
one,
two and
three.) The text with this story gives you more information, but it stands alone as a good story without any words at all.
Flickr groups like this often throw out challenges, for example, the
Six Word Story group (only six words because of Ernest Hemmingway's famous six word story:
"For sale: baby shoes, never used.") recently had a discussion thread where people
submitted six word stories and invited others to submit suitable pictures. And as reciprocity would have it, a number of pictures are submitted be people looking for six word stories. Plenty of opportunity here for cross-curricular work?
My final observation is that "story" can be interpreted fairly loosely and stories can be told within a variety of curricular contexts. For example, could you use pictures to tell the story of a glaciated landscape - from a
corrie, through a
u-shaped valley and down to a
terminal moraine? (Scraping the bottom of my geological knowledge here - maybe
Ollie can confirm if this makes sense as an example!) Or,
Mr W's story about how to make
toad in the hole. Or a photo story on the development of a model. Or... oh, you get the picture!
...And the examples? I thought it only fair to have a go at telling a digital story myself before making this post. So here is my go at a
six word story and my first attempt at
telling a story in five frames. Leave a comment if you have a go and let us know where to find your stories.
Technorati Tags: EduFlickr, literacy, storytelling, DavidDMuir, EdCompBlog
Thanks to Mrs Blethers, I've just wasted some time throwing snowballs at Buddy the Elf (among others). I am ashamed to say that I was on my third go before I discovered that you weren't supposed to hit Santa!
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