Digital storytelling involves incorporating a variety of multimedia elements such as images, audio, video, and Web content into the educational experience to enhance learning beyond traditional text-based books and presentation materials.
Digital storytelling often provides a richer, more immersive learning experience for students, and it helps those who assimilate information better through visual or auditory means than by reading. As a result, teachers are able to reach more of their audience when incorporating digital storytelling into their curriculum.
Benefits of Digital Storytelling in the Classroom
The increasing use of computers and tablets in classroom settings also enables students to create and present their own digital storytelling projects, providing them with the confidence to work with technology and share their learning experiences with their classmates. In creating digital storytelling projects, students learn to research various media and utilize a variety of digital tools to enrich their projects.
Digital storytelling also can be an extremely helpful tool for small group project-based presentations that require sharing and collaboration learning experiences. Another benefit of digital storytelling projects is that they can be created, worked on, and shared electronically by students in any location in the world.
The Digital Storytelling Project Creation Process
The digital storytelling process follows many of the same steps as traditional projects, but often requires more research and a longer evaluation process as a result of the various forms of media involved.
Digital storytelling projects typically involve brainstorming ideas, planning and researching topics, writing a story outline, creating and incorporating various multimedia elements to illustrate the story, editing and revising copy and content, and finally publishing the project for review and/or further revision or improvement.
