Digital Storytelling

Our Journey

Digital storytelling has become a commonly used educational approach for developing learners’ digital literacy skills and creativity (Schleser, 2012). From our reading, it is clear that digital storytelling can take a range of forms and narratives. 
We looked at two main avenues of reading: Design principles, and Teaching-learning activities. Each is briefly outlined below.

The subject, context, or characters of a digital story may be as diverse as the skills or concepts that are being introduced. It is for this reason that creating a digital story may sometimes be overwhelming for designers. Through our reading, we discovered Lambert & Hessler’s (2016) 7 elements of digital storytelling. 

The model gives designers a range of consideration which aid the design process from planning to development. As a group, we decided to use these 7 elements as a guiding model for the development of a digital story.

 

Teaching-learning activities can be classified into six different types: acquisition, inquiry, practice, production, discussion, and collaboration (Laurillard, 2012). Our group has followed this approach when collaboratively designing our digital story. Indeed, a the creation of a successful digital story includes all six types of teaching-learning activity.



Building a Digital Story



Our Storyboard

Digital Storytelling

Melwani, Mohamed & Tay, Lee & Lim, Cher Ping. (2018). Digital Storytelling as a Pedagogy to Develop Literacy and Twenty-first Century Competencies in a Singapore Primary School: Teachers as Designers: Innovative Pedagogy in Preschool and Primary Education.

Lambert.J, & Hessler.B, (2016). Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community. Routledge.

Laurillard, D. (2012). Teaching as a Design Science: Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology: Routledge.

Reflection

Building a digital story offered up a number of opportunities to explore new literacies and skills. After the initial idea, our group decided to use a dedicated storyboarding software, Boords, to build our storyboard. We found that most storyboard tools offer collaborative working, however, usually require a premium account to do this. Boords, however, offered a simple collaborative working platform. Although initially this seemed efficient, areas of collaboration we’re difficult, especially in visual design. Therefore, we used Google slides to plot the visuals of the video and incorporated this into Boords where we were able to write the script in collaboration.

There are a number of useful sites that can be used to create digital stories, ranging from basic to premium level. Our selected software, Simple Show, allowed us to use a wide range of simple icons with engaging transitions between each frame. Icons we’re a fundamental part of our digital story design as our focus was on simplicity and clarity. Furthermore, our transitions remained consistent throughout. On reflection, we believe that adding an original voiceover, instead of a computer generated one, would have added more feeling to our story. Simple Show also allows collaboration, which was a key part of our selection process. 

Our story was largely based on factual knowledge. We held the opinion that a digital story must have a clear purpose in order for the desired message to be successfully conveyed. There were a number of avenues of storytelling we could have taken. For example, we considered adding a character or narrative to the story. This would have made the story more relatable and personal to the viewer. However, we decided to focus on communicating facts and tips on the possibility of confusing the intended message.