Frequently Asked Questions

edutales.eu is a website that was created as part of the cross-border project SESAM GR ‘. SESAM GR ’is a cross-border project of more than 20 partners from the regions of Lorraine, Luxembourg, Saarland, the Federation of Wallonia and Brussels, East Belgium and Rhineland-Palatinate. The main task of the project funded by the European joint initiative “Interreg” is to provide innovative answers to the challenges of a globalized, multicultural and digitized society. Since February 2021, the VCRP (Virtual Campus Rhineland-Palatinate) has been involved in the SESAM GR ’project as a sub-project partner and has launched the website edutales.eu for this purpose. This promotes the approach of storytelling in teaching with regard to the above-mentioned social issues. You can find more information about the individual project partners here.

The quality of the content is guaranteed by the VCRP (Virtual Campus Rhineland-Palatinate), the sponsor of the edutales.eu project and part partner of the major project SESAM GR ‘. Every media product that you can find on the edutales website was subject to a prior check for possible problems, ambiguities or missing aspects.

If you have any questions or criticism, please contact us.

The media products are generally designed for secondary school. However, all are each provided with an individual age label in order to ensure quick allocation.

In order to answer this question, it depends entirely on whether you want to access and use media products from the edutales page or whether you want to create your own media products.

Equipment required to access and use the media products on edutales.eu:

• Computer room with a sufficient number of internet-enabled computers / alternatively a class set of tablets
• If necessary, headphones for listening to the content, if it is an auditory media product
• If neither computers nor tablets are available in sufficient numbers, a whiteboard or a teacher’s computer with a projector and internet access can help. In this way, the class can discover the media product together and in dialogue.

Equipment required for the independent creation of media products:

• Computer room with internet-enabled computers / class set of internet-enabled tablets
• Paper and pens for the conception and development of your own story
• possibly the edutales storytelling laboratory as a guide for developing your own media product
• Recording devices (for auditory media product)
• Video camera / smartphone / digital camera with video function (for a video media product)

To develop your own storytelling product, you can use our interactive storytelling laboratory – the “How to tell stories” canvas. In this, we accompany you step by step from the conception and development of an interactive story, through the choice and formation of the desired characters, to the final implementation as a text, audio or video media product.

Of course! In order to provide you with the best possible support in developing your own media product, we have prepared an interactive storytelling laboratory (canvas) for you. Just like with a board game, you can use it to go through the individual stages of development step by step – from the choice of a topic to the development of a suitable plot to the concrete implementation of your media product.

So that you also get an impression of what is possible with the H5P and Twine tools, edutales also offers an overview of implementation examples.

Here are some tips:

• If this is the first time you are writing an interactive or branching story, you shouldn’t set yourself too much. Start small with a simple plot and few branches. In this way, you will get to know the possibilities and opportunities of interactive stories step by step and you can incorporate larger paths and alternative courses of action with each further action.

• Follow the so-called string-of-pearls model. This helps you branch out your story, but at the same time always brings it back to your basic story. They write a linear story and at some point present the user with a decision, e.g. whether the hero figure should run over the mountain or through the forest. At this point you are at the entrance of a pearl. Both on the journey over the mountain and on the hike through the forest, the hero character experiences different adventures, which may branch out further. Yet they have one thing in common: when it comes back down on the other side of the mountain or reaches the end of the forest, the figure comes out at the same point. That is the exit of the pearl. From this moment on, the story continues linearly until you lead the user to the next pearl. The illustration illustrates the structure of a story based on the pearl necklace model in more detail:

• Use the free OER program “Twine” (download from http://twinery.org/) to make the development of your story as clear as possible. With the help of individual notes you can slide the elements of your plot back and forth and connect them logically with arrows. This gives you a better overview of the overall structure of your action and allows you to draw logical links between the modules.

Text productions on edutales are usually created with the programme “Twine”. The products are available as pure HTML text, which is then integrated on a page. You can find out how this works in our storytelling lab at the “Text” level. Audio and video productions, on the other hand, are usually developed with “H5P”. This programme offers greater scope for creativity and innovative ideas and accordingly leaves more room to realise audio and video products in a variety of ways. You can also find inspiration for your own products in our Storytelling Lab on the “Audio” or “Video” levels or alternatively on the overview page with implementation examples, which you will soon be able to view here.

If you are interested in publishing your media product because you believe that other schools in German-speaking countries can benefit from it, please send us your production. To do this, fill out the contact form below and upload both the media product (as an html or h5p file) and the completed data sheet based on it. After an examination on our part, we will then contact you by email.

Your question does not appear in our FAQ? We would be happy to help you personally. Simply use our contact form.