The incorporation of digital storytelling in the classroom has exploded into programs within the last few years. Digital storytelling has been proven to enhance a student’s writing, research, organizational, technology, presentation, interpersonal, problem solving, assessing and reflecting skills as well as their visual and digital literacy abilities. Given the right guidance children can essentially create every element of their own digital story, from scripting, arranging images, planning effects, choosing music that reflects their story as well as creating a platform for presenting their completed task. They may also be asked to research, define, locate and select appropriate and relevant content then organise their ideas and information to suit their audience and purpose.
The educational benefits of this task allow a teacher to use a creative and engaging presentation style while encouraging children to be active participants in technology and the digital world. This also assists the children by allowing a wider scope for creativity and teaches them how to use the internet to search for appropriate content. Should they have to work in groups or pairs this will also increase interpersonal communication skills such as asking questions, expressing their opinions, constructing narratives as well as overall teamwork and problem solving. Additional to this, the computer skills and experience children gain using a variety of multimedia can be used in many situations in isolation or harmony with skills such as creating text, use of still images and photo editing, recording audio and video, as well as uploading to the internet and saving their work.
(http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu)
As the task is developed, digital storytellers should keep in mind the seven vital elements as stated by Joe Lambert. These are point of view, dramatic question, emotional content, voice, soundtrack, economy and pacing. For more information about these seven please see 7 Elements at
http://www.storycenter.org/memvoice/pages/cookbook.html.
It is evident that these are all beneficial skills for a child to gain, there are some limitations, restrictions or considerations that need to be addressed such as access to particular software, formatting and technical errors, as well as hardware space. It must be noted this is an extensive task that may take some time to complete and during this process children should also be made aware of the copyrighting concerns while a teacher may need to consider child protection, the school’s internet policies and connections to ensure that the task is beneficial and suitable.
http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/educational_goals.html – Educational Goals and Objectives
