Image, video and storytelling

Tony O’Brien, Director of British Council Serbia, Marija Pejatović, Chair of YALS, and Jamie Keddie, Presenter, at the Seminar opening

23rd March, 2013, Belgrade

by Jelena Spasić

On 23rd March we witnessed yet another brilliant seminar organized jointly by YALS and the British Council, and held in the beautiful premises of Guarnerius Fine Arts Centre in Belgrade. The seminar entitled “Image, video and storytelling” was held by Mr Jamie Keddie, a well-known teacher, trainer, writer, presenter and “relentless innovator”. He is the founder of Lessonstream.org, the site where he explores the potential of online video in the classroom and gives ideas that, in his own words, “inspire the teachers and engage the students”.

The seminar started with the warm welcome given by Ms Marija Pejatović, Chair of YALS, and Mr Tony O`Brien, Director of the British Council Serbia. Both of them expressed great pleasure in being able to, once again, give teachers the opportunity to work on their professional development and, thus, improve the quality of language teaching in their own schools.

The seminar was divided into four workshops, each of them showing a variety of different and innovative ideas in language teaching. The first session “Witholding the image” kept the teachers interested till the very end – Mr Keddie showed us how one video can be turned into a gap fill, questions and answers, true or false, continue the story exercise or any other type of exercise that you can think of to keep your students interested.

The second session “Picturetelling” explored the ways one can use flashcards effectively and underlined the importance of Jamie`s principle “say something, ask something” in involving the students in the lessons as much as possible.

In the third session “Taking video apart”, Mr Keddie discussed his seven steps to make a video usable in the classroom. He again underlined the importance of “pushing and pulling language” because it enables students to get the most of the language teaching.

The fourth session “Videotelling” spoke about a combination of video and storytelling, or as you might have guessed, about a way of telling a story through using a video – and we did witness a lovely love story being created between the two bottles of milk.

The seminar indeed broadened our views and enriched our knowledge by showing us how easy it can be to make our lessons interesting and our students interested. After the seminar, around one hundred satisfied teachers testified to that.