Digital Storytelling is a fantastic way to engage students and teachers. There are many different definitions of ‘digital storytelling” . Basically it is an emergent term. For the moment the general consensus is that it refers to the use of digital multimedia, such as graphics, audio, video animation, and web publishing, to tell ‘stories’ in a compelling and emotionally-engaging form. They tend to be short around 8 minutes . YouTube vlogs are a typical example although some digital stories do involve interactivity.

Examples
Before moving on it’s best to look at some examples. Here’s one called ‘The Look’ by Craig Jacobson. This short typifies digital storytelling in that it is a personal narrative about how an educator teaches science fiction. The story is humorous, interesting and uses still images and video from famous science fiction stories and films integrated with historical resources.

The video below is titled: Franz Josef Glacier. A digital story movie of a glacier hike in New Zealand. On the one hand this could have been handled as a vlog in which the user narrates their trip accompanied by photographs. However what identifies this as a digital story is the tone of the narrative is the level of reflection, verse and analogy together with sound effects and zooming on images to emphasis key points.

Here’s another – again note the reflective element, central theme and image zooming.

Here’s another example. It’s a junior school class project and so has multiple narrations which are scripted – so a level of reflection and personal connection with the content is missing from the voiceover (but the images make up for this). So I cant help but wonder if the subject would have been better treated if each member of the class had made their own video and hence with their own personality stamped on the contents.

The University of Houston has a great site on digital story telling which includes a lot of examples:

Personal Reflection
Student created digital stories
* Almost Paradise: tells the story of how a Korean mother brought her family from South Korea to America, in search of a better life. It outlines the difficulties of growing up in a different culture, as well as the clashes between a mother and daughter.
* The Computer and I: My Life in the Digital Age is a baby boomer’s view of how both she and computers have developed over the years.
Plus other personal reflection stories here.

Personal Development Stories
* The A B C’s of Love was developed by an elementary teacher.
* Favourite Books is a digital story that features some favorite books designed for elementary-age children.

Educational
Okay so I have mentioned the reflective element of digital story telling. This is particularly applicable to student created content. However a similar format can be applied to educational digital stories. Again the University of Houston have some great examples.
* The Crystal Palace examines the history of the glass pavilion erected in 1851. This is a good example of using digital story techniques for education. Not a great of reflection but the format allows for the narrators passion to clearly show through. Similar engineering stories can be found here.
* Hiroshima is another Digital Story that does not use a narrator. Instead, Old Man Atom, a song about the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II. This story uses archival images found on the Internet and leaves it to the viewer to decide what they think about the beginning of nuclear warfare. Very effective. Similar social based stories can be found here.
* A History of Radiology provides an overview of the discovery of X-Rays and the evolution of their use in medicine.

So what constitutes a digital story?
According to the Center for Digital Storytelling there are seven elements. I’ve summarized them briefly but it’s worth looking at the site for a full explanation
1. Point of View
2. A Dramatic Question
3. Emotional Content
4. The Gift of your Voice
5. The Power of the Soundtrack
6. Economy
7. Pacing

Now I’ve found some more resources which deal with the subject. They are all very good, but (and please don’t let this put you off from reading / exploring them) I cant help but feel that the authors (including myself with this blog) would be better off explaining the concept of digital storytelling through actually using digital story telling techniques.

[slideshare id=26161&doc=digital-storytelling-26161-11705&w=425]

There’s more here.

“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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