Digital Storytelling?

Storytelling is one of the most common activities we carry out in class, but how about Digital storytelling? It might be unfamiliar for most of us. According to Wikipedia, Digital storytelling refers to a short form of digital media production that allows everyday people to share aspects of their life story. So how can we apply digital storytelling into education?

According to The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling, digital storytelling as its most basic core is the practice of using computer-based tools to tell stories. As the name implies, digital stories usually contain some mixture of computer-based images, text, recorded narration, video clips and/or music. As far as we are concerned, our world is filled with science and technology. In our teaching and learning, we use multimedia, internet these technology to achieve our goals better and efficiently. Likewise, we can use digital storytelling in our classroom to facilitate students' learning.

Firstly, according to Penny, Ur(2009), interest is an essential feature of successful practice. Through incorporate digital storytelling into curriculum, it can help teachers generate students' interest, attention and motivation. For example, teachers can let students use digital storytelling as a presentation tool, in this way, students may feel interested because they can talk about their own experiences and they can all many colorful contents to their story like pictures, video and music.

In addition, teachers can introduce digital storytelling in combination with social networking to increase students' global participation, collaboration and communication skills. Teachers and students can use small handheld devices like iPad,  to create short digital stories without the need for expensive editing software. Therefore, people can view and critique each other's stories, which allows us communicate with people around the world, so we can get more feedback and advice.

Above are two aspects that teachers can use digital storytelling, but I believe there are many other ways we can use digital story to enrich our teaching.