By Hanna Loraine 14 Dec 2012
Netskills Uncut
digital storytelling, e-learning, photography

To brighten the long dark working weeks of Autumn, we’ve spent a few days role-playing, storyboarding and staging scenes for photos.

We’ve been lucky enough to work with a bunch of lovely people from South Tyneside College on an interesting project. Well, we say work. What we really did, was have fun.

It’s been one of those rare occasions when what feels like a day goofing around is actually real work with a purpose.

That purpose is to create engaging e-learning resources for different modules of the Certificate in Education teacher trainer course. The project has been funded by JISC Advance as part of a national programme and, once completed, the plan is to roll the modules out for the entire FE community across the country.

To make studying boring policy documents interesting for students, we’ve set out to create scenarios that will capture their imaginations and draw them into the role-playing.

Together with the project team from the College, we’ve recorded dialogues based on the script they created.

The number of different voices needed meant that pretty much everyone had a character to play and even we had to call on our unsuspecting colleagues next door when all the female voices had been used.

To bring the audio to life, we wanted some photos to go along with it. After a quick session of storyboarding, we took the whole entourage up to the postgraduate suite on the top floor of our university building where natural light is always available no matter how gloomy the day (there is also a pretty cool view over the city and into St James’ Park).

Again, the lovely STC people completely threw themselves into the shoot and soon we had a suitable collection of serious faces, inquisitive faces, pondering faces and close-ups of paper-shuffling.

We’ve so far got the material for the two first modules in the can, so to speak, and we’ll reconvene in the new year to get cracking with the rest. By the time the project finishes, I think there might be a Netskills acting club set up…