Purpose and Benefits of Digital Storytelling in My Teaching Context

 

Purpose and Benefits of Digital Storytelling in My Teaching Context

              If you’re like me, when you first heard the term “digital storytelling,” you thought it was talking about the many education videos you can find on YouTube that you probably often show to your kids. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that digital storytelling was about more than just passively watching someone else’s digital creation. Digital storytelling is all about actively involving your students in the process of blending “video, audio, images, and text to convey stories, information, and ideas” (Warfield, 2016, para 1). Basically, it’s like writing an essay or story or information paragraph, but instead of just using paper and pencil, you incorporate multimedia to share the information or tell the story.

              Digital storytelling can have many purposes and benefits. Since digital storytelling is so similar to the normal writing process (Warfield, 2016), you could use it as a way to enhance your language arts classes. However, digital storytelling is much more versatile than that. You can use it in any class you teach. It is a great way to incorporate the 4 C’s in any subject, as Warfield (2016) points out that the whole process is an incredible blend of collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking, and communication. Perhaps you want to introduce digital storytelling to your students in its own rights as a means of fostering students’ leadership skills or increasing their technology proficiency. As Warfield (2016) states, “Digital storytelling gives your students the “chance to interact with the digital world and make their own mark while still using the internet in a safe environment” (para. 6). Lastly, it can be used as a fun, creative assessment tool in any class across curriculum (Porter, n.d.).

I feel that utilizing digital storytelling in any of the above-mentioned ways would be very effective in my teaching context. I am teacher in a small, multigrade Christian school (I currently have grades K-2). At this age, multimedia is a great tool for captivating my students’ attention. Not only do they love to watch digital stories (I just didn’t know they were called that until now), but they love to get hands on and work on collaborative projects. Digital storytelling provides the perfect medium to do just that, fostering the 4 C’s and combining cross-curricular skills. Not only that, but especially because of the age range that I teach, I think that digital storytelling is a great way to allow my students to show what they know. Because they’re still learning and sometimes grappling with learning to read and write, they might have a hard time completing a traditional paper-and-pencil assessment even though they might actually fully understand the content. Digital storytelling would give them a voice and a means for sharing their knowledge and intelligence without “writer’s block” getting in the way. But it wouldn’t do to promote digital storytelling without a word of warning: So long as I “make content, not the technology, the focus” (Bell & Smetana, 2015, p. 28), I believe that digital storytelling would be an incredible tool in my teaching toolbox.

For example, let’s say we are studying the Life Cycle of the Frog in Science class, and also learning to write an information paragraph in Writing class. Instead of having the students just write an informational paragraph about the life cycle of the frog, I could incorporate so many higher-level thinking skills and technology use by having them complete a digital story similar to this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKS5BovISMU Or, perhaps we are learning about why reading is important. I could have my older students work together to come up with a digital story to share with the Kindergarteners, similar to this one: http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/view_story.cfm?vid=94&categoryid=5&d_title=Language%20Arts, listing why reading is important to them and why they love books. These are just a couple of many examples of how digital storytelling can effectively be utilized in the classroom.        

 

References

Bell, R. & Smetana, L. (2015, July 8). Using Computer Simulations to Enhance Science Teaching and Learning. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265747655_Using_Computer_Simulations_to_Enhance_Science_Teaching_and_Learning

Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling. [Website] http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/example_stories.cfm?categoryid=12#

Porter, B. (n.d.) Digital Storytelling Across the Curriculum: Find content’s deeper meaning. Retrieved from http://creativeeducator.tech4learning.com/v05/articles/Digital_Storytelling_Across_the_Curriculum

Warfield, A. (2016, January 17). 6 Reasons You Should Be Doing Digital Storytelling with Your Students. [Web log post]. Retrieved April 22, 2918 from http://www.gettingsmart.com/2016/01/6-reasons-you-should-be-doing-digital-storytelling-with-your-students/