Digital Storytelling
While walking through the poster sessions, I med Bernajean Porter and talked to her about why stories are such powerful learning tools, and therefore, why Digital Storytelling can be such a great activity for students.
It wasn’t until I was in the 1:1 SIG forum working on an activity about Digital Storytelling that I leanred that she is one of the gurus of Digital Storytelling, hosting workshops and retreates and everything. Pretty cool.
In the SIG activity, I was in a group of people who were exploring what digital storytelling is. We found a whole bunch of great resources:
http://www.digitales.us/ (this is bernajean’s site)
http://www.edutopia.org/use-digital-storytelling-classroom
http://delicious.com/techmotivate/digitalstorytelling
www.storycenter.org
www.inms.umn.edu
www.umass.edu/wmwp/digitalstorytelling
www.techsoup.org
http://www.storycorps.org
www.teachingteachers.com
While there are some very specific definitions of DST out there, our group struggled to clarify exactly what those definitions meant and how they could be applied. Below is what we came up with:
Using digital media to communicate a story to an audience in a way that engages that audience. That engagement usually occurs through the characteristics of traditional story elements, and many of these elements have been formalized by other educators into “7 elements of digital story telling” There was significant discussion of what types of stories qualify as “stories” and which ones don’t. Often they have strong personal elements or employ dramatic tension or conflict. The bottom line, however, seems to be that engagement of the audience is a must.
Seven elements:
- Point of view
- Dramatic question holds the attention of audience resolved at end
- Emotional content
- Strong Narrative Voice
- Sound Track
- Economy (of words?)
- Pacing
June 30th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
[…] Excerpt from: Digital Storytelling […]