Digital Storytelling

While I had reservations with the other two forms of technology that we learned about in our EDCI 546 class, I do not about digital storytelling. These issues, by the way, mainly centered around privacy which I think can be overcome. I think digital storytelling is a great educational tool. As Rachel mentioned in class, she had a group of first graders create digital stories using Photo Story 3. I think that children are a lot more technologically advanced than we sometimes give them credit for. However, besides being fun, what are the educational uses for digital storytelling? Well I like the article’s answer of teaching “twenty-first century literacy.” Digital storytelling teaches children many different types of literacy such as information literacy, visual literacy, global literacy and technology literacy. It also gives children a fairly large project and asks them to implement effective time management. One of the hardest parts of digital storytelling, at least in my experience was creating a good storyline. The craft of digital storytelling teaches kids to be good writers without using the dreaded prompt. The teacher could pick one of the three types of digital stories and assign this to the class or he/she could leave the assignment completely open. One of the reasons that I think digital storytelling is so exciting is because it gives a great deal of autonomy to the learner. Historically this has proven to be educationally effective.
I understand the challenges to digital storytelling such as copyright issues or the amount of time that it takes to create one. These are things that I’ve thought about. Sometimes I wonder how a first year teacher would navigate these things with young children. I think that the teacher has to be very hands on. It definitely helps to have created one yourself. Overall, though I think that digital storytelling could be an exciting and effective educational tool.