Digital storytelling for EFL preschool classroom: tools, activities and themes proposed by preservice teachers

Abstract

The storytelling practice, in general, and the digital storytelling (DS), in particular, entail many advantages for young pupils in the educative context. The main aim of this paper was to examine the tools, the type of activities, and the themes of the stories devoted to preschool pupils. Preservice preschool teachers were asked to choose tools to create their genuine story materials and to design an activity for a specific target age of preschool education to go with them. A total of 136 preservice teachers’ tasks were analysed for this study. The results showed that the most frequent tool type in the three target age (3, 4, and 5 years old) was the one allowing the integration of Dialogues in the stories; the most popular activity type was Reading comprehension for 4- and 5-year-olds, and Images (match or order) for 3-year-olds; and the most recurrent theme was Animal and pets for 4- and 5-year-olds and Friendship for 3-year-olds. This type of study is essential to train preservice teachers both digitally and methodologically for today's school.

Towards digital competence from the conception of students in language instruction: A study within the master's degree in teaching in Andalusia

“…A similar situation occurs with the variable "previous degree", where in general terms, the students who entered the master's degree program with the preferred degree or a degree related to Spanish language and literature have a more favorable opinion regarding the use of SMD and SMS in education. We have no previous research with which to make comparisons, but a trend has been recorded in recent years to conduct research that takes into account these technologies in university studies (Martín-Díaz & Sampedro, 2023), their inclusion in Spanish language and literature classrooms (Álvarez-Ramos & Romero, 2018;Hernández-Ortega et al, 2021;Romero, Heredia & Romero-Claudio, 2023, among others) and a gradual integration of them for the teaching of foreign languages (Bañares & Rayón, 2019;Castillo-Rodríguez et al, 2022;Rodríguez-Núñez et al, 2017).…”

“…But is the teaching staff really ready to face instruction using Learning and Knowledge Technologies (hereinafter, LKT)? It would seem not, since even though numerous studies have shared hopeful experiences for the use of LKT in the classroom, from both the perspectives of initial training (Álvarez-Ramos & Romero, 2018;Castillo-Rodríguez, Santos-Díaz & Díaz-Lague, 2022;Torralba, 2018, among others) and the practice of teaching (Barrientos, Pérez-García & Caldevilla, 2021;Calvo, 2018;Hernández-Ortega, Sánchez & Rovira-Collado, 2021;Labio-Bernal, Romero-Domínguez, García-Orta & García-Prieto, 2020;Porto, 2022, among others), Bañares and Rayón (2019), based on a bibliographic review, detect a need to continue to train educators through strategies that are aimed at technological literacy, competence development and building digital knowledge.…”