Dust Bowl Oral History preserved via Gabcast

Jeanette Hale grew up in Guymon, Oklahoma, and participated this week in a 2.5 day Celebrate Oklahoma Voices digital storytelling workshop. Jeanette created and published the digital story “The Dirty Thirties” yesterday and today, which tells the story of her grandparents growing up in the Oklahoma panhandle.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

To obtain a recording of her grandmother telling stories about what life was like during the dust bowl days (including “Black Sunday”) Jeanette’s grandmother (who just turned 85 this week) recorded her memories using her phone and a free Gabcast.com account Jeanette set up. One of Jeanette’s relatives assisted her grandmother in dialing into the website with the channel number and password. Jeanette was here in Oklahoma City for our workshop, but she was able to obtain a digital recording of her grandmother in the Oklahoma panhandle thanks to Gabcast. We demonstrated the use of Gabcast on day 1 of our workshop. (Our full agenda is available on Google Docs.)

This was just one of many compelling digital stories created and shared by Oklahoma educators this week, working in the computer lab at our State Department of Education. Way to go Jeanette!

I love this project, and treasure the opportunity to work with so many wonderful Oklahoma educators learning the skills of digital storytelling and more importantly, recording and sharing our family and local histories. 🙂

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history, oklahoma, guymon, dustbowl, panhandle, gabcast, digitalstorytelling