Digital Storytelling

January 27, 2011 at 3:18 pm Leave a comment

The term “digital story” seems to be everywhere: educational curriculums, marketing plans, social media content development, etc, etc. But what exactly IS a digital story?

After a lot of reading, a couple of conference sessions, and viewing countless online examples I decided that:

A digital story is a short film that combines a narrated story, song or poem with a series of images, video clips, transition, sound effect, music and written words.

In the (way back) past, storytellers would be accompanied by drumming, dancing and flickering fires. The experience was all-encompassing and tugged at heartstrings in a way that simple narration (or reading) could not touch. Digital storytelling is the modern expression of this mostly lost tradition.

Now that the term digital story is defined (for our purposes) we may wonder about its value. And to this end, I can argue that digging into the mine of digital storytelling will yield diamonds and gold.

We’ve all received fundraising letters in the mail from various causes. They are standard practice in traditional development plans and contain a letter of appeal (sometimes with pictures!), a donation form and a return envelope… and they usually end up, unread, in the circular bin. Not very effective.

On the other hand, a digital story delivered to current and potential donors (via an email newsletter, website, blog, facebook page, etc) are probably more likely to be viewed and – more importantly – shared with friends and colleagues via social network and direct email avenues.

It is evident that digital storytelling is growing to be an important, even necessary, part of the future of marketing and development. To this end, the skills set needed to create these short films need to be incorporated into the educational system.

It’s in this vein that I’ve volunteered to collaborate with a class of 30 fourth graders on the creation of digital stories. They are working in pairs and together each has written a legend that will be the narrative to the digital story they create.

To begin, I made a digital story based on a legend they had read in class. The film was presented in three stages (narrative, images/transitions, sound effects/music) and we discussed how each juncture created further depth to the narrative. You can watch it here.

Now, two mornings a week I work with each pair to choose images (we had a great lesson on creative commons and what copyright means!), practice their narration and oration, tutor in iMovie, etc etc. The kids are having a wonderful time and the process is fun and exhilarating for us all. I’ll report more as we move forward and would welcome your suggestions and comments.