At the most basic level a digital story is the combination of a narrative with imagery. According to Wikipedia:
“Digital Storytelling” is an emerging term, one that arises from a grassroots movement that uses new digital tools to help ordinary people to tell their own ‘true stories’ in a compelling and emotionally-engaging form.
Daniel Meadows, a founder of the Capture Wales project, and a pioneer in digital storytelling states:
Digital Stories are short, personal, multimedia tales. Written with feeling and in the first person there’s a strictness to their construction: 250 words, a dozen or so pictures, and two minutes is about the right length.
Bernajean Porter, who spoke at the WOW conference last year make the distinction between digital storytelling and photo essays. The former starts with a well crafted narrative and ends with the addition of pictures. It also makes use of a first person perspective. Photo essay operates just the opposite, start with pictures and then adds the narrative.
The Center for Digital Storytelling focuses on helping individuals develop personal narratives. The center offers week long boot camps where participants move from written scripts to digital stories. The emphasis is on crafting the story as over half of the week is spent writing and re-writing.
In education digital storytelling may take a broader approach allowing students and teachers to create stories about information that needs to be learned, or stories about best teaching practices, or school improvement.
- Digital Storytelling Finds it’s way in the Classroom
- Digital Storytelling in a Middle School Classroom
- Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling
For our purpose we will use the broadest definition possible – a 2 – 3 minute combination of narrative and imagery that tells a story about something that you feel is important.this could be a personal recollection, a tale about your family, or a story about an educational concept.