Digital Storytelling

1. Descriptive Reflection:

Digital storytelling is the practice of combining narrative with digital content, including images, sound, and video, to create a short movie, typically with a strong emotional component. It is a a short form of digital media production that allow everyday people to share aspects of their life story. 

Digital stories can be instructional, persuasive, historical, or reflective.

Some learning theorists believe that as a pedagogical technique, storytelling can be effectively applied to nearly any subject.

Constructing a narrative and communicating it effectively require the storyteller to think carefully about the topic and consider the audience’s perspective.

It's for teachers, to teach different learning styles and connect to students’ interest in technology, and, for students, to improve their ability to use online content and electronic tools to communicate ideas and implement learning and personal expression.

Digital stories give students an opportunity to experiment with self-representation, telling a story that highlights specific characteristics or events, a key part of establishing their identity.

Creating and watching digital stories has the potential to increase the information literacy of a wide range of students. Moreover, digital stories are a natural fit for e-portfolios, allowing students not only to select representative artifacts from their academic careers but also to create compelling resources that demonstrate the students learning and growth.

2. Critical Reflection:

Actually I like writing stories from I was in grade 9, I feel that is very attracting and helpful to share knowledge and information especially with children in kindergarten and elementary school. It will engaging them and improve their higher order thinking skills like imagination and problem-solving.

I think it is also benefit for higher education students especially when they have some distance courses. The instructor can create digital story to describe the whole lesson and share it to them. In this distance courses I think they also can create personal storytelling to identify themselves to the other course members and also to the instructor. 

There are different tools to create digital stories like, wikis, blogs, photostory, animato, storybird and so on. In this course we use animato online software to create stories. I like it. It is very easy to use.

You can see in this video how to create digital story using photostory program.

Actually I use photostory to create short story in Instructional computer course. You can see it in this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfxjMaKqWQ8

In this course we also learn how to create story board to plan and organize what you want to design. We use it in designing Active Inspire lesson. We first draw the slides that we want to design it and then decide on colors, font, size and visuals. You can see my group story board from this link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1_VWbCfnMUnb2dkdjk3U1B2NVk/edit?usp=sharing

In the future, I will use story telling technique in some lessons to engage students and catch their attention especially with elementary students. I will teach them different tools to create stories and let them choose one of them and create short story about themselves. I hope the teachers and students increase the use of digital storytelling because I see it as powerful tool to share information and ideas and also to ensure the understanding.