Digital Storytelling in The Language Arts Classroom

In Glen Bull and Sara Kajder's article Digital Storytelling in The Language Arts Classroom, the impact of digital storytelling in K-12 language arts classrooms is discussed. First, Bull and Kajder define digital storytelling as consisting of "a series of still images combined with a narrated soundtrack to tell a story." (Bull & Kajder, 2004) They then discuss the most important elements of effective digital storytelling. The elements are a point of view, a dramatic question, emotional content, economy, pacing, the gift of your voice, and an accompanying soundtrack. (Bull & Kajder, 2004) Bull and Kajder go into depth about the importance of each element in an effective digital story. Digital storytelling has been shown to be a very important and creative method for students to convey a story to an audience, especially if their writing skills are not as good as their communication skills. Bull and Kajder discuss that digital storytelling puts importance the students' thoughts, experiences, and opinions, as opposed to research material which just requires students to synthesize data. Bull and Kajder point out that digital storytelling can be an effective way to meet language arts standards, but that it is important to keep the focus on the language arts aspect, not just the technology and media of digital storytelling.

Digital storytelling is an incredible new advancement in today's classrooms. Every teacher who has the task of teaching language arts to a K-12 class can use digital storytelling in some capacity. Whether it is the combined efforts of a Kindergarten class to create one collective digital story, or a high school language arts class which is divided into small groups who are then tasked with creating a digital story from scratch, everyone can gain something by creating a digital story. Just the other day, in fact, I was in an eighth grade language arts/history core classroom at a local middle school and the students had been paired up and were using classroom laptops to research one of the original thirteen colonies, find pictures illustrating the colonies, write scripts, and narrate their digital stories about the colonies. The students did not even realize how much they were beginning to grasp the ideas of the colonies because of their use of technology. Their teacher made sure, however, that they were focusing more on their colonies than they were on the technology. This is a perfect example of how the technology can be adapted to fit just about any language arts lesson, and how it reinforces the materials students are learning.

Resources:

Bull, G., & Kajder, S. (2004). Digital storytelling in the language arts classroom. Learning & Leading with Technology, 32(4), 46-49. Retrieved from http://www.digitalstoryteller.org/docs/DigitalStorytelling.pdf