Digital Storytelling with Glogster EDU
A part of teaching is storytelling. As a teacher, you tell the story of the world around you. The history, the mechanics, the reasoning behind everything that your students observe and wonder about.
Digital storytelling allows us to take a linear series of events and bring them to life in a multidimensional experience; to communicate, collaborate, by infusing all types of media into the process.
And Digital storytelling can be practiced anywhere; in almost any imaginable form: in homes, schools, libraries and businesses, by anyone from beginner technology users to experts. In education, teachers and students use digital learning concepts across all content areas, and all grade levels.
The Glogster EDU team comes across amazing Digital Storytelling every single week in Glogpedia. So we thought we’d share some of that here.
What makes Great Digital Storytelling?
Here are a few ideas:
Style and Substance
Great digital storytelling gives more than the facts: it gives a bit of atmosphere as well. By incorporating different styles of text, music, or historical documents and photos (bonus points for links to resources and videos of key concepts and places), the story being told really comes alive.
Depth and Connectedness
Great Digital Storytelling also tells a story in different ways. It presents more than the facts: it also gives the learner a reason and a way to learn more about the subject. It presents information that inspires discovery, and offers ways to make those new discoveries easily: by linking to different resources.
Digital Storytelling isn’t just told, but experienced. It serves as a gateway to a whole universe of new information and insight- it is not self-contained, and doesn’t have to be.
We think great digital storytelling is also about making a case for what’s important, and finding out what’s important to the person experiencing your story. It distills the facts and relevant information, and helps guide the learner to teach him or herself more about the topic. It sparks interest, and gives a reason as to why this new branch of knowledge can be attractive and useful.