Digital stories remain a mostly untapped resource in the classroom for students and teachers.
They allow students the opportunity to create something meaningful that they’re invested in, sometimes more so than just a normal report or research paper. Through the stories they tell, students can employ critical thinking, conduct original research and contribute to a larger academic conversation.
Despite all the positives digital stories bring to the classroom, educators face many challenges when using them. One of the chief concerns is getting both students and teachers acquainted with the process of creating a digital story.
It’s why I designed a learning tool to help – How to Create a Digital Story.
The interactive tutorial runs through a 10-step story creation process. A blog post at Tech Soup – Digital Storytelling: A Tutorial in 10 Easy Steps – along with my own original research on digital stories inspired the idea.
The text comes largely from Tech Soup’s post with images, design elements and a bit of interactivity added by me. The Tech Soup post was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License so I did the same to what I created.
I hope teachers and students can use the tool to explore the power and potential of digital stories.
If you’d like to read the research paper, simply click the “paper” icon in the presentation. It discusses the current state and future of digital storytelling in more detail.
I’d like to thank all of the researchers who are cited in the bibliography for their research and insights. That goes double for the professionals who shared their time and spoke to me about digital storytelling.
They are:
- Liv Gjestvang of Ohio State University.
- Joe Lambert of the Center for Digital Storytelling.
- Michael Coventry of Georgetown
- Jason Ohler of the University of Alaska.
See full-size version.
