Digital Storytelling

Digital storytelling is a great way to get students excited about writing and showing their writing in a digital fashion.  Digital storytelling is pretty self explainitory.  It is simply telling a story digitally, using technologies that include pictures, video, voice, and music.  You can use some or even all these components to bring your writing to life, and it allows students to be creative and have a deeper connection with their story and their writing.

Digital storytelling is a fantastic tool to use in the classroom.  Sixth grade teacher, Kevin Hodgson, created a helpful site that introduces digital storytelling, gives some examples, and even gives some resources for creating your own digital storytelling videos.  One tool to use with students that Hodgson highlights on his site is voicethread.  Voicethread combines image and voice.  You simply arrange pictures and/or video to tell your story and then add your voice to them.  The best thing s that it’s simple for students to use, and it’s something they will have fun doing.

I used digital storytelling for the first draft of my memoir.  I liked being able to plan out the story with the video first as opposed to just starting on the draft.  The video an pictures really helped the story unfold naturally, and it made the process of then beginning  write my actual paper much easier.  As a teacher I would definitely consider using this approach with my students.

Before I began, I first had to choose a resource to use to create my digital storytelling video.  I was surprised at how many there were to choose from.  One that I had used before for my about me video was animoto.  Animoto is very easy to use.  It allows you to upload videos and add music, but if you use the free version it limits your video to 30 seconds, which is somethin to consider with students.  I also checked out Little Bird Tales.  This is intended for younger students, but I think older students may enjoy using it as well.  This allows you to upload pictures or video and add either your voice or text. 

Although I looked through many resources onine, I found myself having trouble fining one where I could add elements and minipulate my story the way I wanted to.  The program I ended up using was Window’s Movie Maker, which is a program included on Windows computers.  Although this program is a bit more confusing than many of the online ones, once you get the hang of it, it’s really not that hard.  This allows you to add pictures and videos, written text, music, voice, and you can really do a lot with it.  You can even add transitions and title slides.  I tried to include all four aspects, image, video, voice, and music to my digital storytellin memoir draft, however I didn’t have a microphone available to use, so instead of using my actual voice I used text to still incorporate my voice into the video.  I then uploaded my video to YouTube so I could link it to my blog.  To view my digital storytelling draft click on the link below. 🙂

Click here to watch my Digital Storytelling Draft!