Uses of digital storytelling in primary and secondary education

“The idea of merging traditional storytelling with today’s digital tools is spreading worldwide.” Anybody today with a computer can create a digital story simply by answering such questions as “What do you think? What do you feel? What is important? How do we find meaning in our lives?” Most digital stories focus on a specific topic and contain a particular point of view. “These topics can range from personal tales to the recounting of historical events, from exploring life in one’s community to the search for life in other corners of the universe and every story in between.”

For primary grades, the focus is related to what is being taught, a story that will relate to the students. For primary grades, the story is kept under five minutes to retain attention. Vibrant pictures, age-appropriate music and narration are needed. Narration accompanied by subtitles can also help build vocabulary. Content-related digital stories can help upper-elementary and middle-school students understand abstract or layered concepts. For example, in one 5th-grade class, a teacher used digital storytelling to depict the anatomy of the eye and describe its relationship to a camera. A fifth grader said, “This year I have learned that places are not just physical matter but emotional places in peoples’ hearts. iMovie has made all my thoughts and feelings come alive in an awesome movie.”

These aspects of digital storytelling, pictures, music, and narration reinforce ideas and appeal to different learning types. Teachers can use it to introduce projects, themes, or any content area, and can also let their students make their own digital stories and then share them. Teachers can create digital stories to help facilitate class discussions, as an anticipatory set for a new topic, or to help students gain a better understanding of more abstract concepts. These stories can become an integral part of any lesson in many subject areas. Students can also create their own digital stories and the benefits that they can receive from it can be quite plentiful. Through the creation of these stories, students are required to take ownership of the material they are presenting. They have to analyze and synthesize information as well. All of this supports higher-level thinking. Students can give themselves a voice by expressing their thoughts and ideas.

Digital Storytelling can be used by a class to explore local community institutions as well. Government school students from the Bengaluru district of Karnataka, India used digital storytelling to design narratives of their interactions with local institutions such as banks, primary health centers, libraries, shops, police stations, post offices etc. Through these interactions, students attempted to deepen their understanding of the work of these institutions, their vision and challenges and how the institution members responded to these challenges. The digital stories created by these students became curricular resources, especially in social sciences, for these schools as well.

When students can participate in the multiple steps of designing, creating and presenting their own digital stories, they can build several literacy skills. These include the following: Research skills by finding and analyzing information when documenting the story, writing skills when developing a script, and organization skills by managing the scope of the project within a time constraint. Learning about the use of technology is a skill that can be gained through learning to use a variety of tools, such as digital cameras and multimedia authoring software and presentation skills through the presentation of the story to an audience. Students also gain interview, interpersonal, problem-solving and assessment skills through completing their digital story and learning to receive and give constructive criticism.

Faculty and graduate students at the University of Houston have created a website, The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling, which focuses on the use of digital storytelling by teachers and their students across multiple content areas and grade levels.

The National Writing Project has a collaboration with the Pearson Foundation examining the literacy practices, values, attitudes, beliefs and feelings, associated with their digital storytelling work with students.