Teaching Digital Storytelling in the Elementary Classroom: A Personal journey in the Step-by-Step Process

(originally posted in ISTE Connects)

It’s a record hot summer day, my daughter is patiently sitting in the back seat of the car with her face pressed against the window, “when will we be in San Francisco” she asks. I assure her it won’t be much longer. Shortly after, we cross over the Golden Gate Bridge and I begin to hear Scott McKenzie’s song in my head, making me wish we wearing flowers in our hair. Over the next couple days we gather as many memories as possible all the while clicking away on the camera to capture the essence of our sun kissed vacation. Months later we revisit our photos from the trip and begin telling stories of what we remember from each snapshot. It is at this moment I have a “teaching digital storytelling in the elementary classroom” epiphany.

For the last five years I have been teaching and producing digital storytelling as well as working on grants that deal with technology and education at the University of Oregon. From these experiences I have honed my skills on the magical process of creating digital stories, the important role of the storyteller and the educational uses of digital storytelling.

The way I see it, children are not only a target demographic for consuming stories, but as anyone who spend more than five minutes with one can tell you, they are also some of the most brilliant storytellers on this planet. Digital storytelling appears to be an ideal platform for children to exercise their seemingly innate storytelling ability while learning to use the ever-evolving technological tools. For educators, the process of creating digital stories provides a number of valuable educational uses that span across disciplines. According to Dr. Bernard Robin from the University of Huston, digital storytelling can help students “learn to conduct research, synthesize large amounts of content and gain expertise in the use of digital communication and authoring tools” (The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling).

With this in mind, I decided to combine my knowledge of digital storytelling and education with my parental role and teach digital storytelling strategies, including production skills and software, to my 8-year-old daughter. Granted the child of a pianist will probably know a thing or two about a piano, hence my daughter knows a thing or two about media, but she took to digital storytelling like a fish takes to water. It was incredible to watch her work through the process of production and create something quite remarkable. This is when my little experiment turned into something bigger.

I approached my daughter’s teacher and proposed the idea of teaching digital storytelling to the entire class. With full support and a time slot right before lunch on Fridays, I began teaching digital storytelling to a 2nd/3rd grade class of 17 students two months ago. This process is still ongoing and as a guest author to this blog, I would like to document my experience and share with you all that I have learned. To do this, I will break the process into 3 phases and conclude with my own digital story designed to capture the process I have gone through of teaching digital storytelling in an elementary classroom.

For now, I would like to ask that you think of digital storytelling as the contemporary expression of the ancient art of storytelling and as Leslie Rule from the Center for Digital Storytelling
notes, “digital stories derive their power by weaving images, music, narrative and voice together, thereby giving deep dimension and vivid color to characters, situations, experiences and insights. Tell your story now digitally”.