What do we mean by ‘digital story-telling technology’?
On this site are heaps of tools or ‘apps’ that we can use on our devices – on a computer, laptop, smartphone, notebook, iPad, Kindle Fire or whatever you happen to have.
They can be used to tell, share, and save stories in all kinds of different ways, by
- making comics
- making animations
- turning pictures into a slide-show or a movie
- editing something you have filmed
- writing out what is said in a video or audio recording (transcribing).
There are also apps that can be used to translate stories
- by adding subtitles to a movie in another language,
- or by recording the speech in another language (dubbing).
Why are we excited about digital story-telling technology?
Telling stories is part of being human and sharing stories is part of being in a community.
We are particularly excited about encouraging young people to tell stories. When young people get to tell stories, they get to be an active part of their community, helping to keep old stories alive and to create new ones.
Using these tools, they can share stories across huge distances. Their reo can enrich the community of Māori speakers, from the Pā ‘Enua, to Australia. Young people who might not get to hear the reo at all, can listen to their peers telling relateable stories.
We also want people to tell stories about all kinds of things. For a language to be strong it needs to be alive in all parts of our life. These tool could help make it possible for young people to watch Star Wars – or talk about Beyonce – in their own language.
Who is this for?
We want these resources to support the revitalisation of Cook Islands Māori. We hope they will be useful for
- teachers who are teaching the reo, who are teaching in the reo, or who have multi-lingual classrooms
- students who are learning the reo
- young people (or indeed anyone) who wants to share their reo, and use it to tell a story
- parents and grandparents who want to encourage their tamariki.
We also think these tools might be interesting and useful for people who are revitalising another language. And for anyone who who has stories to tell.
What do I need to know about technology?
Not much to get started 🙂
You need to know what kind of system your device runs on. If you don’t know – have a quick look here.
Then you can choose apps that will work for you. To see what apps will work with each system, check out this table or click on the ‘tag’ that matches your system.
We’ve also rated all the apps as: easy, medium, or hard. This might give you an idea what to try first.
Some of these apps don’t even need to be downloaded. These ones are more likely to work on any device. We call these ones ‘web-based apps’ but they also get called ‘browser-based’ by some people.
For most of the apps we have included instructions, or linked to some. Check these out.
If there’s a word you don’t understand, we have a Glossary coming soon. We’ll try to explain some of the jargon there.
Kōrero Rorouira 