Diving into Digital Storytelling

 

Digital storytelling has many attractive benefits in the classroom. It is, in a sense, creating a mini movie to share an idea. Who doesn’t love a mini movie? Digital stories can be used for many purposes such as telling narratives, sharing information or personal experiences. It gives students the power to bring their ideas and creativity to (digital) life and add audio, voice, animation, and much more. Digital storytelling “assists learners in writing creatively and more effectively by visualization of their writing, which results in an additional level of perception and authentic personal learning that enhances the writing process and effective learning experience” (Moradi & Chen, 2019, p. 3). This becomes highly engaging and can also be a great opportunity for students to collaborate in production. Our language learners may be less hesitant to write and share when they have the chance to use digital storytelling. It puts less stress on printing and more emphasis on the writing process as a whole. Students also have the opportunity to preview their project, revise, and rerecord as needed. “It enhances the multimedia and visual literacy of students, and it provides learners with a competitive compelling voice by elaborating the boundaries of learners who can communicate with and by enhancing the power and depth of that communication” (Moradi & Chen, 2019, p. 3).

Digital storytelling is a student-centered learning experience. To avoid running into roadblocks along the way, it’s very important for teachers to share the necessary steps for students to plan, develop, and create an effective digital story. Though it is student-centered, I still see value in teachers facilitating this learning process and conferencing with students to provide helpful feedback or answer questions.

My kindergarten students love listening to stories. I read aloud to them every day, but they also really look forward to digital stories shared through various sites, including StorylineOnline, BookFlix, and YouTube. I will often play a digital story for my students during handwashing and snack break time. Since learning more about the impact of digital storytelling in the language learning classroom, I thought I would search to see if I could find a student example. I came across this version of Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown on YouTube (shared by LindaSuhei1), in which someone exercised their dual language while sharing a classic story with a wonderful homemade diorama of the story setting. This example shows how you can encourage the reference of a child’s home language, while exercising new language and vocabulary. I really like the idea of students creating a setting to a story that they have written and then reading their story aloud through digital storytelling. I imagine that they would be proud of the end result!

 

Moradi, H., & Chen, H. (2019). Digital storytelling in language education. Behavioral Sciences, 9(12), 147.