Watch Your Audience Grow

The Great Canadian Story Engine inspired me as I started to get interested in digital storytelling at the start of the decade. That site’s now gone but I came across another great Canadian site today. It’s called Work Through Time and it’s all about Cape Breton’s industrial and rural past. The text and audio of the stories are available in French, Gaelic and Mi’kmaq - this is fantastic!

On this site, there are well-recorded old stories from the years ago, voiced professionally by an actor with a great voice. For teachers, there are downloadable lesson plans. The navigation on the site takes some getting used to and I find myself wishing there were links to featured audio stories from the homepage. A little while after browsing the site, I found this interactive story map - http://67.220.228.95/~work2009/Interactive/Stories_Map.php which is a good way to find your way around.

Here’s how the site describes its mission:
 
"The digitization of historical materials, held by individuals and heritage networks across Cape Breton Island, becomes increasingly important. Work through Time: Cape Breton Stories of Land and Sea was borne out of a desire to showcase, through a digital medium, the rich cultural diversity of the working lives of Cape Bretoners to local, national and global audiences."

So the Great Canadian Story Engine may have gone, but it’s great to see such a well-put-together multilingual multimedia Canadian story site as Work Through Time:

http://www.workthroughtime.ca/

Thanks to @GaelicTweets on Twitter for the link