Digital Storytelling is a way of telling stories with the use of technology. The arrival of approachable technology has enabled educators to go for digital storytelling. With this, they can personalize stories using audio, text and pictures to make it meaningful for the learners.
Digital storytelling is a great way for students and teachers to share their knowledge. It offers new ways to combine several medium such as animation, website, audio, graphic, video to create powerful stories to hear and see.
Importance of Digital Storytelling
Digital Storytelling is a powerful tool for students that help them to understand concepts and subjects. It offers various types of learning and enables students to use their visual, auditory and kinesthetic skills. Digital storytelling is great tool that enhances creativity and thinking skills in the students when they brainstorm to make a story. It also helps students to learn how to collaborate and work in a team.
Digital Storytelling create collaborative environment where students actively participate and share ideas and carry responsibility to complete academic goals. Such environment promotes life-long learning. Digital Storytelling is one of the way teachers can understand student’s outlook. While creating stories they can develop their management, organisational as well as language skills.
Digital Storytelling for English Language Classroom
Digital Storytelling can enhance student’s listening and writing skills. It is also helpful in understanding information and developing vocabulary. Digital Storytelling improves literacy skills of the students like: writing, reading, listening and speaking. Teachers can also assess student’s English language understanding and find out areas where they need to work with their students.
These elements of digital storytelling are helpful in improving language skills a lot:
- the point of view
- dramatic question
- emotional content
- the gift of voice
- the power of soundtrack
With all these above mentioned elements of the digital storytelling, educators can enhance all fours skills (writing, reading, listening, and speaking) of their students.
For example, the educators can look or improve their students’ creative writing in skills by asking them or helping them in building the plot to evaluate their writing.
Then, the educators can also evaluate the students’ progress in reading by observing at their self-reading and flow of reading in the storyline.
Educators can also observe students speaking skills by observing how they pronounce, word stress and sentence intonation for the narrative part.
Digital Storytelling Tools for Students
Storyrobe is an advanced tool that has lot of features like:
- Add Photographs
- Add Narration
- Send to YouTube
- Email Story
- Saves the story and import into iPhoto
- Create Threaded Stories
StoryKit is also an amazing tool to create digital storytelling. It is free of cost and can be used iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone.
Create and share vibrant storytelling with voicethread on iPod Touch, laptop, iPad, iPhone and Android.
Using amazing features of Animoto, you can do beautiful storytelling using videos online and much more. It is free but you need to pay to upgrade. Animoto can be used on iPad, iPod Touch, iPhone, and laptop.
iMovie makes it easy to look and share HD video you shoot using your iOS device. It can be used on iPad, iPod Touch, iPhone.
