Digital Storytelling

Stories are narrations that we make up ourselves and tell our children which helps them in their growth and learning, it’s a way we pass on our knowledge about history, art and culture, etc. to our future generations. It is the first step towards educating children.

From ancient times to the present, storytelling has played a role as a mainstream education medium by passing on information from one generation to another. In recent years, there have been many changes in the ways used for making and telling stories, the different mediums used to convey the stories and the target audience.

Digital storytelling is a modern form of the ancient and the traditional art of storytelling. Storytelling has always been used as a helpful educational tool for the sharing of knowledge and moral values. It is a procedure through which students learn and actualize their meaning and knowledge from the stories they listen to and share. Digital storytelling is a creative pedagogical approach that enhances the learning outcomes for children and engages students in insightful and meaningful learning for general, scientific and technical education.

Significance:

• Digital storytelling creates a developmental approach for teaching and learning that encourages the students to have creative problem-solving skills based on cooperation and peer-to-peer engagement.
• It helps in using digital media with innovative teaching and learning practices.
• It facilitates unified and integrated approaches to curriculum formulation, and engage students in analytical thinking and deep learning.
• It has the potential to increase student engagement and provide better learning practices and creates a more engaging and fun learning atmosphere.
• It can be a great tool in building a special emotional affinity with education for children.

Recommendations:

Digital stories can be used in many educational institutions for learning purposes for children of all ages. Teachers can create and share the videos with their students to watch, share with others and give their feedback.  This can be helpful for students living in distant areas and are unable to attend the classes regularly. Digital stories can also be made by students based on their projects and subjects and share the videos which would encourage a collaborative learning environment and practices for students. Students can deploy multimedia tools as well as other technical skills to create these digital stories. Proper training must be given to teachers to incorporate digital storytelling techniques into their teaching sessions as it is becoming more popular in classrooms across the world.