We have a story in all of us, and how we tell it depends on our abilities and interests.  Digital storytelling offers storytellers – young, old, novice, and professional – a multimedia, multimodal platform for sharing their stories.  Anything that can be interpreted digitally can become part of a digital story.  Media such as cameras, recorders, slides, drawings, and pictures combine to create a story that separately or collaboratively uses textual, visual, spatial, audio, and gestural modes.  The result is a permanent story that becomes available for others to view, enjoy, and learn from.

This website offers Best Practices for school library media specialists who want to introduce digital storytelling to their students.  Digital storytelling has been used for the last seven years but many school districts are still unfamiliar with its usefulness and feasibility.  Digital storytelling is the “new literacy” that takes students beyond standard print research projects and provides them with an outlet to analyze, deconstruct, and reconstruct texts. Students with all abilities can learn some aspect of digital storytelling as they become researchers, directors, artists, and performers.  When school library media specialists and classroom teachers collaborate in using digital storytelling technology, students have a greater range of access to information and a more comprehensive understanding of how to transform this data into knowledge.

Included on these pages is information pertaining to research that supports digital stories in the educational setting, how to find grants for your story project, what kind of technology is required for a digital story program, how to evaluate your digital story program, and how to publicize your final projects to bring attention to your students, teachers, and school.

This website will also assist school library media specialists in selecting the best digital storytelling websites and articles to develop the best digital storytelling program their library media center can offer.

 

The following sources were used for this introduction:

Daminco, James. (2006, September). Exploring freedom and leaving a legacy:  Enacting new literacies with digital texts in the elementary classroom [Electronic version]. Language Arts, 84(1), 34-44.

Davis, Alan. (2005, Summer). Co-authoring identity:  Digital storytelling in an urban middle school. Then Journal (1).  Retrieved October 19, 2007, from http://thenjournal.org:16080/archives/

Hopkins, Candice. (2006).  Making things our own:  The indigenous aesthetic in digital storytelling [Electronic version]. Leonardo,39(4), 341-344.

Joseph, Linda C. (2006, July/August). Digital storytelling. [Electronic version]. MultiMedia&Internet@Schools, 13(4) 13-16.

Ohler, Jason. (2005, December/2006, January). The world of digital storytelling [Electronic version]. Educational Leadership, 63(4), 44-47.

Ware, Page D. (2006, September). From sharing time to showtime! Valuing diverse venues for storytelling in technology-rich classrooms [Electronic version]. Language Arts, 84(1), 45-54.

 

Page completed by Nadene Eisner

 

Nadene Eisner
Nell Fleming
Nicole Kaffel
Janet Vogel (webmaster)

Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
LIS 506
November 2007