Digital Story

DEFINITION

A digital story is a multimedia movie that combines photographs, video, animation, sound, music, text, and often a narrative voice to communicate a message. A digital story is more than “digital telling,” it’s not just a “tell me the facts” presentation. Digital stories often use music as well as narrative with visual imagery in emotionally powerful ways. (See the English WikiPedia article for “Digital Storytelling” for more.)

WORKFLOW

  1. Digital storytelling involves a process of planning, producing, editing, and publishing.
  2. Create a “channel website” for your classroom to share digital storytelling videos online. An educational YouTube channel or Vimeo channel can be an excellent virtual space for sharing digital stories.
  3. Alan Levine’s website, “50 Ways to Tell a Web 2.0 Story” includes outstanding resources and process suggestions for digital storytelling.
  4. Storychasers maintains a helpful resource wiki for digital storytelling.
  5. The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling is an outstanding resource site maintained by the University of Houston
  6. Jason Ohler offers excellent resources on digital storytelling.
  7. Bernajean Porter’s Storykeeper‘s Resources website is exellent, along with her Digital Media Scoring Guides on DigiTales.

TOOLS

iOS Apps:

  1. iMovie ($5)
  2. Pinnacle Studio Pro ($13)
  3. Plotagon (free)
  4. Hokusai Audio Editor (free)
  1. Audacity (free)

Video Editing Software:

  1. iMovie for Mac (commercial)
  2. Sony Vegas for Windows (commercial)
  3. <Microsoft PhotoStory 3 for Windows (free)
  4. Moviemaker Live for Windows (free)

Story Wheel ($3 iOS app) is a storytelling app which lets users narrate randomly selected images. This app can’t be used for digital storytelling in the same way apps like iMovie can, but it’s a great app to get kids creatively inventing stories.

VIDEOS & TUTORIALS

  1. What makes a hero? – Matthew Winkler (4.5 min, from TEDed)
  2. Four Steps to Great Content from Vimeo’s Video School (12 min)

EXAMPLES

  1. Lillie and John by Karen Jo (on YouTube)
  2. The Dirty Thirties by Jeanette Hale (on YouTube)
  3. Lots of student-created digital storytelling examples are included on the “Categories of Digital Storytelling” wiki page from the Learning 2.010 Conference in Shanghai (co-created by Carol Jordan and Wesley Fryer)

* Image attribution: Digital Storytelling image created by Wesley Fryer using Brushes for iPad

Also Check Out:

Permanent link to this article: https://showwithmedia.com/digital-story/

3 comments

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  1. These are amazing resources and thankyou for sharing your wisdom with the masses!! I look forward to meeting you in the digital world over the next few years, all the best!
    Mark Yeates.

  2. update: Story Wheel now costs $2.99

      • on May 13, 2013 at 8:13 pm
      • #
      • Reply

      Thanks for the price update, I changed it on the page!

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