Blog 3- Digital Storytelling

 

Digital Storytelling is a powerful teaching and learning tool that has emerged over the last few years; however, it is not a new idea. (Robin, 2008) Digital Storytelling was first created by Joe Lambert and Dana Alchley in 1980 (Robin, 2008) for people to tell their own story in a new and exciting way. There are three styles of digital storytelling: personal narrative; informative or instructive stories; and historical event story presentations. With advanced and constantly evolving technologies like cameras, scanners, computers and audio devices, digital storytelling is an excellent way to motivate students to become creative storytellers while still using traditional processes. Students can then combine various types of multimedia, such as recorded audio, video clips, music, text and graphics, which can be played on a computer, uploaded onto a website or burned onto a DVD for future students and teachers to watch or analyse.

I believe that digital storytelling is a tool that can be well positioned within a classroom to take advantage of user-contributed content and help support teachers to overcome difficult obstacles in the classroom. For example, the use of visual images against text allows visual learners within the classroom to understand and generate their own understanding. This concept can be adapted into numerous subject areas, such as history, to tell the story of Julius Caser and his life or even into performing arts on how to compose a song; its uses are quite endless. However, “teachers cannot just simply add a computer to conventional teaching strategies, for it is an unsophisticated approach that adds minimal learning to student experiences in the classroom” (Robin, 2008, p. 1). Then again, this can be overcome by teachers receiving adequate training so they are able to select appropriate technologies that will enrich the students’ involvement in the class and also broaden their knowledge and understanding of various topics. It has been found that the use of visual images combined with written text enhances and accelerates students’ comprehension, making digital storytelling an especially useful technology tool for collecting, creating, and analysing (Robin, 2008).

In the future I will use digital storytelling to create interesting and interactive lessons for my students. It will help arrange difficult mathematic problems and patterns in a much simpler and straight forward way. In music, students could create a time line about the history of music through digital storytelling to assist their learning. Therefore, I believe that digital storytelling will be a fantastic digital technique to integrate into my future teaching practise.

 

Multimedia Used

 

Blog 3 has used multimedia that present digital storytelling has a very important technology tool that can enhance student learning and understanding of various subject areas. The image presents a young girl holding a carmera, dipicting how childern can tell their own story through the use of technology, while the YouTube video supports the statement that digital storytelling is a fabulous tool to allow students to become story tellers of their own personal understanding of given content.

 

Multimedia References