Digital Storytelling

Would your students enjoy creating stories by combining words, sound, images, and interesting special effects?  Once they've learned the more basic skills of multimedia writing through regular blogging, podcasting and using images, it's time to get them involved in creating their own digital stories.

The term "digital storytelling" describes a wide variety of new media production practices.  What ties them all together is the use of audio --both narration and sound -- and images to enhance the telling of a story that has been written.  The stories can be about memorable experiences or events, beloved people or pets or places. 

Sometimes people include videos in digital stories, but Jason Orech, a teacher with a lot of experience teaching digital storytelling, thinks it's best to avoid video.  As he put it, on a digital storytelling forum for educators, "DST is about writing, not movie making. Great creativity can be achieved with stills. Ask Ken Burns."

The following pages contain links to tools and resources that show you how to put together digital stories, as well as examples of a few digital stories that have been made.  If you come across other resources or examples that you really like or have found helpful, please share them by adding to the list!