Digital Storytelling

The ability to write and communicate ideas is necessary in society, but it is often one with which people struggle. Digital storytelling is "storytelling…conducted using…digital media in a computer network environment" (Xu, Park, Baek, 2011, 181). An educational environment can use multimedia in the form of digital storytelling to incite and nurture writing skills in students of all ages (Xu et al., 2011, 181). There are several different platforms in which to employ and view digital storytelling, one of the most common being a "virtual world" such as Second Life (Xu et al., 2011, 182).

There are several "stages" of the writing process as laid out by the University of Houston's Instructional Technology department in their study on digital storytelling (Xu et al., 2011, 182). These stages include:

Topic and selection
Gathering resources
Identification of purpose
Organization of content
Creation and finalization of story
Presentation

(Xu et al., 2011, 182). All of these steps include the use of multimedia, and it is because the storyteller is not simply using text, but "image resources (pictures, drawings, photographs, maps)" and "audio resources (music, speeches, interviews, and/or sound effects)" that a student becomes more "involved with the digital world" and the writing process (Xu et al., 2011, 182&189).

The results of this research show that students who took part in digital storytelling were not only more involved in the initial creation process, but also "paid more attention in revising their writing compared to the control group who did not make a digital story" (Xu et al., 2011, 184). The revision process is a complex one and the digital storytelling environment helps students understand and employ this process more effectively "by choosing appropriate words, adjusting the sequence of sentences or removing sentences" while students in "the traditional writing group edited their writing merely by checking spelling and counting words" (Xu et al., 2011, 184). The interactive aspects of digital storytelling also "emphasize the active role of the student rather than the teachers" which helps motivate students (Xu et al., 2011, 183).