Digital Storytelling is a great way to integrate technology and engage students in deeper thinking about the curriculum as well as help them become powerful communicators.
The process of crafting the digital story builds communication, creativity, visual and sound literacy, and project management skills.
Digital storytelling provides a great way for engaging students in the curriculum while building creativity, communication, and critical thinking. These lessons are a great way to get started.
The digital storytelling section of Creative Educator has articles and classroom stories to help you be successful integrating digital storytelling into your curriculum.
Explore these samples to get a few ideas that will help you integrate digital storytelling into your classroom curriculum.
Samples can also help set expectations when you are beginning a digial storytelling unit with your students.
Rather than writing straight autobiographies, students can use a digital storytelling approach to communicate the story surrounding important events in their lives. Writing about the events in narrative forms helps students build skills in showing rather than telling a story, improving their writing ability. In this story, Katie shares how she felt about adopting a new baby sister from China!
Storytellers have been sharing myths, legends, fables, and tall tales for millenia. Students can bring their favorite versions to the digital age, by telling the story with pictures, sound effects, and illustrations to support their narration.
While many students dread writing biographies, asking them to transform their writing into a compelling digital documentary about a person's life helps motivate them to write. Students select a scientist, politician, inventor, explorer, or other historical figure and develop a biography that answers how their background influenced what they believed and how they acted as well as the personal qualities that helped this person succeed.
Students can transform their written biographies into compelling digital documentaries that shows how the person's background influenced what they believed and how they acted as well as the personal qualities that helped this person succeed.
Developing docudramas requires not only extensive research but asks students to place themselves in a distant time or take on the role and view of a person with very different life experiences than their own. As students role-play what life was like they help history take on a life of its own and connect in a very personal ways to their own experiences.
Students were assigned the task of researching a time period in history and creating a digital story about that time period told from the perspective of someone who lived during that time. Students found a variety of primary source documents and images to include in their story created in Frames. Students wrote the script from one perspective and were expected to embed a variety of historical facts from their research into their story.