Digital Storytelling

Bernard Robin describes digital storytelling as the art of combining a variety of digital multimedia with narration to tell a story on a topic. As with any traditional story, a digital story contains themes and is told from someone’s view point. Digital stories are often used as personal narratives, to recount historical events or to instruct on a topic.
In the classroom, many teachers find use for digital stories as an introduction to a lesson, where they can be used to bridge the students’ previous knowledge with the lesson to be taught. It can be used within the lesson to aid the conceptual development of the lesson, or at the end, to summarize the details covered in the lesson. Where ever it is used in the classroom, it is a powerful tool that helps students to deepen their understanding and memory on a topic.
Students can be taught to develop their own digital stories. In this process, students will learn the following skills:

• Research
• Writing
• Organizational
• Technology
• Presentation
• Interview
• Interpersonal
• Problem solving
• Assessment
What is crucial for students being taught the art of digital storytelling is their understanding of the content area. Having a library of pictures without knowledge of the content or storytelling technique will simply lead to bad storytelling.