Digital Storytelling Essay

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Digital Storytelling: A Classroom Experiment
Mojtaba Tajheri and Pushpinder Syal
Introduction
Storytelling is a powerful way to express ideas and communicate experiences. It takes place both through the spoken form and in writing. Storytelling has a been part of teaching since the definition of subjects, as far back as Aristotle (Alexander, 2011). According to Sharda (2007a), storytelling, in general is a powerful pedagogical paradigm that can be used to enhance learning outcomes for general, scientific and technical education. With the rapid development of information technology, “students live in a world that has been transformed by technology, and they are often referred to as ‘digital natives’ because their exposure to digital resources …show more content…

Digital stories combine a spoken “text” with still images, and sometimes with music or sound as well, to create what is in effect a “mini-movie” (5 minutes). Digital storytelling, therefore is the process of creating a short purposeful movie with various multimedia components in order to create an engaging presentation.
The use of digital storytelling in education allows students to express their thoughts and ideas in a different, and hopefully creative manner. It is also used to make students reflect on their learning; it can be equally used as a method of assessment. However, the emphasis of digital storytelling has to be on the story itself, rather than the technology. “Story without digital works, but digital without story doesn’t” (Ohler, 2008, p. xviii).

Integrating Digital Story Telling (DST) in English Literature …show more content…

Students gradually assume responsibility for comprehension, interpretation, and understanding of the text through the process of selecting words and producing multimodal representations as a group, guided by the roles assigned to them. Thus, a DST provides a social context in which students utilize multimodal tools to construct personal interpretations of the text and externalize their interpretations through collaborative activity.
The structure of a digital storytelling activity is such that the students’ attention is directed towards metacognitive process such as planning, monitoring, evaluating and reflecting on the accomplishment of multimodal tasks (Ohler, 2008). DST also provides social support that helps students acquire additional reading knowledge and skills; but most of all, it is a fun activity and today’s students relate to such activities very

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