7 Things You Should Know About Digital Storytelling

From the Educause site. Digital storytelling briefly defined together with teaching and learning issues and applications. Essentially we’re talking about students creating a story using a variety of media and material underpinned by a strong narrative. Basically an oral essay. Typically the content of the story is something which means a lot to them - there’s an emotional attachment to the subject.

“Digital storytelling is the practice of combining narrative with digital content, including images, sound, and video, to create a short movie, typically with a strong emotional component. Sophisticated digital stories can be interactive movies that include highly produced audio and visual effects, but a set of slides with corresponding narration or music constitutes a basic digital story.”

A key charactoristic is that unlike most e-learning these days digital storytelling is mainly individual rather than collaborative group work. I can see how personal and reflective blogging can lead to or encourage students towards this activity since blogging relies on construction of stories and views and equips the student with the basics of producing content for public consumption.Combining the text with media such as video and images is a short step away.

From the article here’s a suggestion on how it’s done, (note the time length): “A digital story typically begins with a script. The storyteller then assembles rich media to support the ideas and emotions in that script, including music or other audio effects, personal or public-domain images, animations or video, and other electronic elements. The storyteller pieces together and edits the digital story, creating a short movie, usually about two to four minutes long, in one of various file formats.”

What does everyone else think? Storytelling and the oral tradition of passing information on is part of our nature. Could we use this in education?

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