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15 May 2025

Presentation Tools - Digital Storytelling

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The What, Who’s, Why’s, and How's of Digital Storytelling

By Amber Scroggy

Technology has advanced rapidly in the past twenty or so years. Today’s digital world offers countless creative digital presentation tools at our fingertips, allowing stories to go beyond pen and paper. Storytelling has evolved into a dynamic blend of creativity and technology providing endless opportunities and inventive ways to communicate and share ideas, (Dreon et al., 2011). Through learning what digital storytelling is, why it’s beneficial, who uses it and how they use it, we can better understand the process and impact of digital storytelling.

What is Digital Storytelling?

Digital storytelling is a dynamic presentation tool used to combine a narrative with digital media, (Robin, 2008) bridging the gap between traditional instruction and the digital culture of learners today. According to, Digital storytelling: Capturing lives, creating community, by Joe Lambert, as sited by (Dreon et al., 2011, pg. 5) there are seven elements for creating a digital story. These elements are point of view, a dramatic question, emotional content, the gift of your voice, the power of soundtrack, economy, and pacing. Through the incorporation of these elements and digital presentation tools, a digital story can go beyond traditional instruction creating a more meaningful learning experience that encourages connection for contemporary learners.

Take a look at this video to learn more about digital storytelling:


Who Uses Digital Storytelling?

    This is really a quick answer. Anyone who wants to create a digital story!

How is Digital Storytelling Used?

    To answer this question, I will briefly discuss how librarians, teachers, schools and students have use digital storytelling. 

    Librarians - use digital storytelling to share library resources, highlight events, engage readers, promote literacy, teach information literacy skills, and to enhance the learning experience. They accomplish this through the creation of digital booktalks and book trailers, (Dreon et al., 2011). Librarians create these digital stories using various presentation tools (see my previous blog A Look at Presentation Tools Used by Librarians), incorporating images, sounds, videos and more to make content more accessible and appealing, (Dreon et al., 2011). Similarly, teachers and schools use digital storytelling as a tool for collaboration and integrating technology into curriculum including general education: math, literature, history, and science, or to introduce projects and assess student outcomes. Finally, Students use digital storytelling for projects assigned in any course including interdisciplinary projects (Dreon et al., 2011), to demonstrate their understanding of concepts through demonstration of their written, organizational, and creative skills, (Dreon et al., 2011).

Take a look at this video to see how elementary students used digital storytelling:



Why Use Digital Storytelling?

    Digital Storytelling is exercise for the brain. Creating Digital stories helps to develop a range of skills including research, writing, storyboarding, video editing, and critical thinking skills, (Dreon et al., 2011). Additionally, digital storytelling alleviates accessibility issues for diverse learning needs in a number of ways including video, audio, pictures, writing, and other interactive elements reducing barriers to learning.

If you made it all the way here....

Thank you for reading!😁

References:

Robin, B. R. (2008). Digital storytelling: A powerful technology tool for the 21st century classroom. Theory Into Practice, 47(3), 220–228. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405840802153916

Dreon, O., Kerper, R. M., & Landis, J. (2011). Digital Storytelling: A Tool for Teaching and Learning in the YouTube Generation. Middle School Journal, 42(5), 4–10. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23047749


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