De facto, anything that has a strong impact on mind lasts longer than anything injected through books and other means of educating. And to support this, we all agree that we remember the stories we heard in childhood by heart than the chapter we learnt later in school. Similarly, teacher-crafted digital stories also take an interesting place when it comes to enriching present lessons within a larger unit. Making conceptual lessons significantly legible, digital stories act like a way to make possible the discussion about the topics.
A story can be as small as explaining how you got to a place; or as big as a multi-volume encyclopedia. With no intention to build or create one, everyone tells stories at every point of their daily lives; at a departmental store, at the dinner table, while driving your child to the school, you would narrate stories from your memory and try to make your point.
Digital storytelling by definition is the act of telling a story with the help of media resources like photos, graphics, text, audio, video, music and other multimedia functions. This gives a whole-new perspective to the teaching-learning experience to the existing methods.
If we list the uses of digital storytelling in education, the result will be overwhelming, both in terms of numbers and its worth. Digital storytelling can be used as a great instructional tool by teachers and educators.
Teachers’ instructions decked up with images and audio and video elements! Does this sound interesting? Well, to the students’ advantage a growing number of educators and institutions are taking ways to explore umpteen methods of blending multimedia into their teachings and instructions involving their students in learning, and that too with utmost cheer and concentration.
An analytical research showcases that with the use of multimedia in teaching we can guide our students to retain their new information and also comprehending the old ones. We grant them a complete new perspective to look at the difficult side of learning and they rather redefine their knowledge bank.
Using devices like tablets and smartphones in creating digital stories may prove to be a cost effective medium to record videos; thanks to the effective cameras these devices come with these days! This can also help teachers capture any real time images or videos that they think might prove useful in the lessons.
Digital Storytelling – a tool that helps educators bring a revolution in classroom learning!
Another windfall point that Digital Storytelling spells out – it is a persuasive tool for students to create their own stories.
Wondering how? OK!
Students watch exemplary digital stories made by their teachers and other story tellers and developers.
Then, they can be asked to take assignments. They can take out a specific viewpoint from the story and research on the subject.
This activity encourages the students to add spark to their creative streak – interest, attention and motivation clubbed together to define the much-skillful ‘digital generation’ in today’s classrooms.
Students start to research and narrate stories of their own – learn to use the library and take the apt content out of it. Enhance the internet knowledge as they conduct deep research and scrutinize the wide array of content.
Coherent communication skills – organizing the creative ideas – being inquisitive and raising queries – expressing beliefs and opinions – draft narratives! These are a few added benefits that participating in the ‘creation of digital stories’ presents to students. Does this seem any less than simply great?
Learning to put together the thoughts, implement ideas and create stories for an audience makes students rational and creative individuals in the process.
Finally, the publishing of the digital stories – how does this feel – what all did it take to finally complete a digital story – some precious experiences worth sharing – and most importantly receiving and giving feedback regarding the quality of the work. Students get a chance to share all hows and whats with peers. This definitely boosts their morale and promotes their emotional intelligence.
Personal narratives: Creating personal narratives is one of the main uses of digital storytelling as a part of higher education. Such narratives can be used to depict issues like multiculturalism, racism, globalization and many more that can be of help to the students in their respective courses.
Stories that examine historical events: Digital stories can also be made around different historical events. Such stories have been created by students in many universities across the globe and these have proven to be useful in many courses in arts and social sciences.
Stories that inform or instruct: These set of stories can be built around any subject or topic. While all digital stories are said to inform, this specific form of it can be used in the fields of science, information technology, math and anything else one can think of.
Source: digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu
While we talk about new ways to enhance education with the use of technology, there remains a challenge of students and educators getting used to these. Digital storytelling is a growing trend in the field of education and therefore educators and institutions still finding ways to integrate these with other classroom activities.
We are still in a phase where we are finding out new ways to use technology to effectively inform, instruct, engage and fill in the digital natives in their new ways.