Integrating Digital Storytelling

The article that most resonated with me this week was Bernard Robin's "Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling" because it is something that I can see myself applying in the elementary classroom, taking principles that I believe in yet using a new format to reiterate the concepts for students. In my current classroom my third grade students are focusing on writing stories from their lives that have a beginning, middle, and end, use dialogue, and include sensory descriptions. In literacy they are writing about these elements after each story they finish reading. This focus lends itself to using digital storytelling for a variety of reasons. When my cooperating teacher does read alouds with students she asks them to picture in their minds the action of the story as if they are watching a movie to get them thinking about the different story elements. Students always like this analogy and are quick to describe what they see, what they hear, what they smell, etc. when they listen to the story. As in everything, however, there are some students who face these tasks reluctantly. I would be very interested to see how they would react if my teacher used a digital storytelling format for her read alouds to make the story elements come alive for students. I also think it might be beneficial for students to create their own digital storybooks based on their own writing. If students had the opportunity to record their writing in an audio format I think it would motivate them to include varied dialogue in their drafts, which is one of our main goals for the unit. As Robin and some of my classmates have commented, digital storytelling is not a revolutionary concept, but an extension of what we already do so frequently in the elementary classroom-share ideas. Digital storytelling is one more manner for students to connect around the theme of developing ideas, sharing insights, and creating something that is a cohesive final product while also practicing the skills of digital citizenship.
I would also be interested to learn about the results of the study conducted by Helen Barrett that Robin mentions at the end of his post, as her research raises important questions that I often consider when thinking about educational technology in terms of exactly how the technology is aiding student learning and how the digital form is different than traditional paper based methods with similar content and learning aims.